


take violent things and make them kind

by HeraldAros



Series: The Hatake Riku 'verse [3]
Category: Kingdom Hearts, Naruto
Genre: Attempted indoctrination/inducement of Stockholm syndrome, Betrayal, Blood and Injury, Don't Try This At Home, Gen, Kidnapping, Medical Jargon, No KH3 spoilers in fic, Some characters from the anime filler episodes show up, Undercover, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-10-03 10:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17282336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeraldAros/pseuds/HeraldAros
Summary: When Tsunade sends Hatake Riku to Sound, he has three goals: 1) find out whether Sakura and Sasuke are even there; 2) find out what Sound's doing with the genin and dropouts they seem to be kidnapping; and 3) make it out in one piece without anyone finding out about his key.Only Sound seems to be legitimatelytrainingthe kidnapped genin, there's no sign of Sakura or Sasuke that Riku can see, and it's kind of hard to sneak around when he's under surveillance the whole time—and, on top of that, he can't use chakra.[Second full story in the Becoming Ninja 'verse; this story is completed and updates approximately weekly.]





	1. Setup

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title adapted from Sleeping at Last's "Sun." The whole lines are "I guess space, and time / Takes violent things, angry things / And makes them kind."
> 
> So this story was written in a _post-Spiderverse fervor_ that somehow resulted in me polishing off about 20k in 5 days. That means this story is done! There's an ending and everything! I'll be revising each chapter before posting; that does mean some weeks might get skipped, if I don't have time to revise. Right now, I'm shooting for uploading a chapter each week on the weekend; so chapter 2 will go up on **January 5th**.
> 
> Timeline-wise, this is set about six months after Naruto leaves Konoha. Riku is 14, basically competent at field medicine, and thinks he's ready to tackle the Chuunin Exams. Incidentally, this is right around the same time that Karin is first recruited by Sound.
> 
> In general, this fic will include a number of original and/or filler characters. However, the only anime/filler storyline canonical to this 'verse is the _Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow_ ; figure any other characters have not interacted with Naruto and their lives proceeded accordingly.

Tsunade doesn’t drink while giving Riku the mission details, but the bottle sits on her desk, and even a normal ninja could smell it on her breath.

The mission concerns Sound, so of course she’s drinking. She doesn’t say Orochimaru’s name, just off-handedly mentions that there’s no evidence he’s even at the base in question.

Sound has been poaching from the other villages. Genin, mostly, or former genin; some dropouts, some pushed out of their villages, some just out on missions or training trips. Tsunade hands Riku the files and gives him the highlights while he picks meaning out of densely-packed lines. His reading has improved steadily in the last year, but official documents still confuse him—those, and older jutsu scrolls, usually written in hiragana and the most obscure idioms or allusions.

(Tenten will give him about half an hour, and Tsuru can be relied upon to teach him anything that may come up in front of Anzu and make her look good, but the person Riku asked about these things the most was Ino, who always knew who _else_ to ask if she didn’t know the answer herself.

He and Ino don’t talk much, anymore, so Riku’s had to struggle through scrolls on his own. He does okay. Mostly.)

The active genin who have gone missing have all been decent but not stellar; good enough at specific skills to earn commendations, but not good enough to advance on their own. Some have bounced from department to department, like his reluctant teammate Mariko before she landed in Ms. Honda’s clutches. Others are just young or otherwise inexperienced. A couple have demerits for impulsive or impatient actions. One was kicked out for recklessly endangering her squad during the invasion.

“They must know who they want,” Tsunade says, words largely unslurred. “There are others who _haven_ _’t_ been grabbed. No two from the same team, no one from stable, long-term teams… And he hasn’t picked up any medics yet. That’s where you come in.”

Next, she hands him a mission report in easy-to-understand kanji. She waits for him to finish and look up. There’s an outpost in the north with some kind of illness. It might be bacterial, might be fungal, might be viral; the medic stationed at the outpost was severely injured about a month ago, and his replacement was reassigned to a different outpost at the last minute.

“Why reassign her?” Riku asks, and Tsunade sighs deeply.

The report doesn’t _say_ all the remaining chuunin assigned to the outpost are idiots who couldn’t tell bronchitis from athlete’s foot, but if they couldn’t narrow the possibilities down at _all_ … It sounds like they needed that medic.

“The area seemed quiet, and the other outpost needed her more. Medics are always spread too thin.”

Riku’s not a great strategist, but in this context, the gap in medical care for this outpost seems…engineered.

“This was Sound’s plan,” Tsunade confirms, avoiding her teammate’s name again. “It fits the pattern. The timing, and the nature of the illness, point to Mariko as the target.”

“Oh.”

Mariko, who barely puts up with sharing her mentor’s time with him, let alone him _and Tsuru_ ; Mariko, who Anzu has called a “half-feral kitten” on more than one occasion; Mariko, who started specializing in viral and fungal infections about five months ago and who T&I have tried to reassign to their own division at least three times since.

“So you want me to go with her?” Riku guesses. “Make sure they can’t take her?”

Tsunade sighs again. “No. You’re going to go so they _don_ _’t_ take her.”

Riku blinks.

“Hatake Riku,” Tsunade stands up and plants both hands on her desk, leaning forward, demanding eye contact. “You are going to get kidnapped again.”

///

“Go to the north outpost,” Mariko mutters. “It’ll be easy. We just need two of you. Oh, no, you don’t need any support. Why would you need that? You’re just hiking through Fire Country. What’s the problem?”

“We’re just two genin,” Riku obligingly lists off. “Neither of us has an offensive specialty.”

“Technically,” Mariko puts in. It sounds grudging.

“Technically,” Riku allows. “Technically, we’re two medic-nin apprentices. If they sent any other medics…”

Mariko makes a low sound. “They’d have disappeared without a trace. What was the Hokage thinking?”

Riku at fourteen lies better than Riku at thirteen, but _better_ doesn’t mean _well_. Still, all he says is, “That Fire Country’s been relatively safe lately?” He shrugs. “That we could handle it?”

“You, maybe. But don’t even try to tell me you couldn’t use—god, one of the heavy-hitters. An Akimichi, or an Inuzuka.” A pause. “Hey, doesn’t your uncle have a thing with dogs? Can’t you have backup?”

Riku does have a giant key, but he’s under strict orders not to mention it to anyone. The only people who know are the Hokage and his uncle. The key does give him an edge, but it’s not really the kind of backup they’ll need for this mission.

After all, Riku’s whole job here is to play bait. Any other escort would muddle that, introducing too many variables for Tsunade to plan around. After that private meeting in her office, she called both Riku and Mariko in later to explain the decoy mission in detail.

Mariko is here to replace the missing medic-nin. Technically, this specific outpost doesn’t exist, so Riku and Mariko were told to pose as tourists.

(So Riku is bait pretending to be an escort pretending to be a tourist.)

By all rights, Tsunade should have just sent Mariko. She’s a more competent medic-nin; Riku’s a decent all-arounder, but Mariko’s a specialist. She’ll need to call in someone even more specialized, but until she gets eyes on the situation, no one’s sure what exactly that specialty will be.

Mariko’s the best choice to send. Riku, the way Tsunade presented the decoy mission, is going with her as a nod to potential danger. While Riku isn’t technically an offensive specialist, he’s the only medic-nin on staff personally trained by Maito Gai in taijutsu and Tenten, the most promising weapons-specialist Konoha’s seen in a decade, in both staffs and swords.

Not to sound egotistical, but Riku is kind of a badass. After over a year of training and medical study, he’s the best support Mariko could ask for: not only can he keep her safe on the way there, but on paper, he looks like an even better kidnapping candidate than she does.

He knows for a solid fact that Ms. Honda demerited him when he passed out and Naruto brought him to the hospital. Gai wouldn’t have done that, and Riku hasn’t given any other adults reason to notice him all that much. Beyond the official demerits, though, there’s the easily-verifiable fact that, up until recently, it was Anzu and not Ms. Honda who did most of the mentoring, while Ms. Honda instead focused on Mariko. It wouldn’t be a huge assumption to think that Riku might resent Mariko for that—and maybe even Ms. Honda, Anzu, and Konoha as a whole.

He doesn’t resent anyone for that decision. (Really. He may not _like_ Mariko, may think she’s a little too brutally honest when she doesn’t need to be and a lot too stuck up when she shouldn’t be, may even want to make chuunin before her just to prove that she isn’t better than him, but he doesn’t _resent_ her. He even asked her if she’d consider being on his team for the Exams, _that’s_ how little he resents her.)

Riku’s also been in the village for just over a year; if Orochimaru’s trying to get people to switch loyalties, Riku must seem better than Mariko for that alone.

Even if he wasn’t sure at the outset whether Orochimaru was really trying to get Mariko (and, considering Orochimaru’s at the top of the list for most likely to be involved in Sakura and Sasuke’s disappearance, Riku was already fairly convinced), by the end of the first day, he’d be certain.

The merchant group they're traveling with decides to detour west for some unknown reason. (Well. They’d said it was to visit Takigakure, but Riku’s leaning toward bribery.) After a quick decision, Mariko and Riku agree to break their cover a little and head north anyway, spinning a story about relatives of Riku’s they’re off to visit. This holds them through encounters with civilians in several small towns, but just in case, they maintain a civilian pace.

Civilian pace is boring. Mariko looks ready to eat his face off by the end of the second hour; Riku’s ready to return the favor halfway through the fourth. If they're under surveillance, though (and the merchant group’s detour suggests they are), they can’t afford to use ninja techniques out in the open—out on the road, there’s some safety in how public it is; there are enough travelers, enough people working in fields or at rest stops, even enough ninja and daimyo’s guards that they can’t be attacked openly.

At night, they don’t dare risk staying out in the open. They call nights early as soon as they come across a place to stay in the evening, and they make sure to talk to others who would note a sudden disappearance.

Nothing happens, and that’s almost worse.

By the second day, they’re twitchy enough that every inconvenience seems like sabotage. A closed road might be the work of some enemy; a bridge in disrepair could be a trap. Large groups are both a relief and suspicious. It’s now Day 4, and their room is just a step up from a closet with two futons thrown in. Only in the safety of their room, of the dead of night, close enough to whisper their complaints, would they risk talking about the mission.

They fall asleep still trading complaints and wake up groggy and miserable when it's still dark out. After devouring an early breakfast, they leave, the better to make the outpost before noon.

By midmorning, they’ve arrived, and Riku feels all the muscles in his body unlock. Stress leeches out of him with every step closer to the outpost they get. Mariko practically skips.

They’re stopped by the chuunin guarding the door, of course, but once they deal with the formalities, they’re shown rooms and another chuunin leads Mariko off to see the first documented case of whatever-it-is.

Riku lets the Leaf ninja take her out of his sight, figuring that she’s safe for the time being. She’ll be under too much scrutiny for Sound to risk just grabbing her so early.

The same isn’t true for him, he thinks as he feels the genjutsu take hold of his consciousness and drag him down, down, down into sleep.

///

Light registers first: the room, through his eyelids, is dimly-lit; there’s a surface underneath him, not hard, but not comfortable, either. Scents next: his own sweat, stale from however long he was asleep; someone else, although faint, so they’ve showered a lot more recently than he has. No perfume or cologne, no smell of food, no gunpowder or oil or metal smells…

Riku opens his eyes.

The room is plain, sparsely furnished. As he sits up, he feels the futon underneath his palms, thin enough for him to feel the stone underneath. No blankets, no sheets, one pillow.

There’s another one, maybe a foot and a half or two feet away, with a girl sitting cross-legged on it.

The girl is red-haired and red-eyed, with plain glasses, old, oddly-circular scars on her arms and legs, and a nasty-looking scrape on her jaw. The skin looks raw, but it can’t be bleeding: there’s no blood-scent in the room. Riku doesn’t smell any ointment either, though, no salve to stop infection, and without a bandage on it, that’s asking for trouble.

“You should put something on that,” he tells the girl anyway, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Unless you don’t care about it getting infected.”

As he rubs his eyes, his head feels…off. A moment of checking reveals that his forehead-protector is missing. So are his clothes, his knives, and his sandals. He’s in a plain grey shirt, with grey pants that stop halfway down his calves.

At least the last time he was kidnapped, he got to keep his clothes. This time, he didn't even get to keep his underwear.

The girl, dressed similarly, looks at him with a raised eyebrow when he meets her gaze again.

“Yeah, I’ll ask the people who kidnapped me for some bandages,” she says, with deep sarcasm. “You’re an idiot. I can’t believe they stuck me with an idiot boy.” With a huff, she stands up and makes a show of turning away from him.

“Who’re they?”

She glances at him over her shoulder and out of the corner of her eye. Riku’s had to deal with enough of Ino’s dramatics to know that this is pure show: if she really didn’t want any attention, she’d turn her back all the way and stop engaging.

“Don’t tell me you don’t even know who captured you.”

“I didn’t see their forehead-protectors when they were knocking me out from behind, no.” Rule #1 of pretending to be kidnapped is to not let on that you’re just pretending. Riku doesn’t know how things work here, whether Karin’s trustworthy or not, whether Sound has ways of monitoring the rooms they’ve stuck their prisoners in, so better safe than sorry.

At that, she sighs, but relents and sits back down, kneeling this time the way that seems easy as breathing for most ninja. “Congratulations, recruit. You’ve been drafted into Sound.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> General reminder that I have a [DreamWidth](https://heraldaros.dreamwidth.org/) where I post writing updates, a [PillowFort](https://www.pillowfort.io/HeraldAros) that mostly just mirrors what I post elsewhere, and a [Twitter](https://twitter.com/HeraldAros), where I retweet pretty art.
> 
> Quick note: like I said above, I'm revising these chapters before posting; I'm also working on the next short story, which will be Riku's Chuunin Exams. It's all roughly plotted out, but there are more moving parts for that story than this one, so I don't have an ETA on it yet. 
> 
> I do have a plan for where all this is going, though; right now, the goal is to have the Kingdom Hearts 1 story up before the end of the year. (The Destiny Islands gang will show up in other stories before then.)
> 
> As always, I adore comments and kudos.


	2. Routine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 1 of Sound infiltration, in which Riku learns the ropes and, more importantly, learns that he does not _like_ these ropes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this chapter is...by far the longest of all the chapters for this story. (It's about average for _Becoming Ninja_.) There's a fair amount to get through!
> 
>  **Content warnings** for this chapter: casual physical violence, including corporal punishment for minor infractions and physical abuse in a teaching/training setting. This chapter also discusses some unhealthy training methods and what could be considered medical malpractice on Riku's part: please always have a spotter when you engage in dangerous physical activities; please seek medical treatment for injuries; please do not enable your friends to avoid professional medical help when _they_ injure themselves. (Riku is a dumb kid. Don't be like Riku.)

“My name’s Karin,” Riku’s new roommate says, and bows superficially.

“Riku,” he returns, trying not to betray either nerves or excitement.

He’s in. Mission success. And Karin here was obviously intended to be Mariko’s roommate (whether she knows that is questionable).

Now all Riku needs to do is figure out whether Sakura and Sasuke are here, and, if he can, get an impression of Sound’s methods. Tsunade was clear: once he’s got the information Konoha needs, he needs to bail _at once_. He should not, under any circumstances, risk his own safety trying to help anyone else, even other Konoha nin.

He also has orders not to reveal his key to anyone, but he’ll probably be able to handle that.

“When you say drafted...”

“They’ll be here any second,” she cuts him off. “Look, we don’t have time to play catch-up. Just do what I do, exactly what I do, and we’ll be fine.” She lunges forward—Riku revises his estimate of the space to _way too small_ —and grabs him by his shirtfront. “If you get me in trouble, I will end you. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good. And don’t try anything stupid—newbies are _always_ stupid—none of us can use chakra, so you won’t be able to _get_ anywhere.” Without releasing his shirt, she grabs one of his wrists and yanks it up to his face so he can see the seal, all curved lines and strange symbols, on the inside of it.

She releases him right as the door to their room—their cell? All it has is two beds, no hint of a closet or a bathroom, not so much as a window—pulls open. The ninja who stands in the doorway is tall and broad, wearing a Sound forehead-protector, and all he says is, “Up, recruits.”

Karin rises immediately. Riku considers staying where he is, but the look in her eyes is murder. She doesn’t even need killing intent.

He stands. Karin bows. After another pause, he grits his teeth and bows.

Before he can straighten, there’s a hand on the back of his head, pushing down so unexpectedly and with such force that it sends Riku sprawling.

“You will show respect,” the man says. His sandals look clean, but they smell like blood. He doesn’t say “or else.”

Riku’s cheek and chin smart a bit, but he can tell the skin isn’t broken, isn’t even bruised, really. It’ll be a little pink for a while, is all. His _pride_ , on the other hand…

He really thought, accepting this mission, that he’d have a handle on everything. He’s been kidnapped before, after all. This sounded similar to that experience in the safety of Tsunade’s office. Could he pretend to resent Konoha enough that Sound would keep him around? Sure, all he has to do is think about the shitty apartment Naruto’s been living in, all alone, for _years_ ; he can fake anger at Konoha pretty well, with that in mind. Could he pretend to dislike the uncle he hasn’t seen in over a month, the girl who just broke up with him, the girl who’s much more likely to actually be able to _help_ people while Riku is stuck running errands and filing paperwork? The teacher who put him in that position, and all the other friends who smile politely and don’t do a damn thing about any of it?

Yeah, Riku can fake that pretty well. What he can’t fake are reflexes he _doesn_ _’t have_ ; he only sometimes remembers to bow to Tsunade right away, and Ino used to get on his case about how he referred to people—whatever translation magic he has is permanently set to “informal” unless he goes out of his way. So he has to try to remember to call adults Mister or Miz and to call Tsunade _Lady_ Tsunade, and sometimes he does but a lot of times he just…forgets.

All the adults on the Islands call their mayors by their first names. You call your parents Ma or Mom or whatever, and you call teachers Mister or Miz, and you call priests Sir or Ma’am. That’s _it_ , in Riku’s experience. Sora’s parents, Kairi’s mom? He called them by their first names, all the time, and no one had any problem with it.

So, yeah, the bowing is gonna take some getting used to. Riku pushes himself up onto his knees and pauses, just in case, keeping his head down. No reaction. He stands, and bows, and stays there until the man walks back through the doorway.

“What did I tell you,” Karin mutters, grabbing his sleeve and pulling him through the door.

“Do they do that all the time?” he mutters back as they join others in the hall. Riku counts six others, all in the same outfit. Some have obvious, if minor, injuries like Karin’s, all of them bruises and abrasions. No one limps or moves stiffly, so whatever corporal punishment Riku’s in for seems limited. Some are uninjured. Most of them are younger than Riku, bottoming out at a kid who can’t be more than eleven.

These must be some of the missing genin. Riku doesn’t recognize any of them, but then, the files hadn’t included pictures. (Tsunade _really_ didn’t want him to think of this as a rescue mission. And it’s not! Unless he can figure out a way to make that work, and then it will be. Riku is _not_ gonna face Sora and Kairi and have to tell them, “Oh, yeah, I was in basically a Sound prison, that’s why I couldn’t visit, but don’t worry, I made it out by ditching dozens of other people I could have saved. Orders, you know?”)

“Shh!” But she leans in and whispers, “Do what?”

Hit you, he almost says, but the marks on the others answer that question. “Make you bow,” he whispers back instead.

“Sometimes. Just do what I do and I won’t have to hurt you.”

He mulls that over. The walls all around them are stone; Riku knows some of Orochimaru’s bases are underground, but he couldn’t say for sure whether this one is. The stone could just be masking tunnel walls, since there are no windows, just torches at regular intervals. Theoretically, Riku ought to be able to gauge how close to sea level he is based on minuscule changes in things like inner ear pressure, but that’s never been a thing Riku’s trained or focused on.

Hitting things, now _there_ _’s_ a skill Riku’s trained. Physical endurance. Anatomy and physiology. How human musculature works, the better to put it back together. Even some poisons and diseases he can figure out, although in most cases he’d rather just grab Mariko or Anzu or even Ms. Honda, since he’s no expert.

“Everyone has the seal?” he whispers next.

Karin shoots him a withering look, but she also nods and, with her hand hovering around her waist inconspicuously, holds up two fingers.

Riku checks his other wrist, where there’s another seal, same as the first. While moving, he can’t get a good look at either; he tries to channel chakra into his hand. The chakra circles the chakra point in his wrist, spinning itself into oblivion without coming back into his reserves the way it normally would if the jutsu fails.

Hand-seals are right out, then, along with every jutsu Riku knows. He could try something else, like wall-walking, but he doubts the guards would appreciate that, and his face already stings.

The group make their way down a torch-lit hall until they reach a large, metal door. It sits solidly in its frame, with an intimidating, huge lock on it.

Riku’s fingers twitch to summon his key, but now’s not the right time. Too many witnesses. It’s so tempting, though; the lock’s just so big, so secure-looking. He has an irrational urge to crack it open.

It’s the same urge to run obstacle courses just because they’re _there_ ; Gai found that out the hard way, when he made one for Tenten and Lee and just planned on having Riku watch them go through it before trying it himself. Of _course_ that was one of the few days Riku managed to finish with Anzu early, and of _course_ Gai wasn’t waiting for him at the start of the course, where Riku normally met up with Tenten to practice.

Riku managed to twist his ankle three times, dislocate his shoulder once, and strain most of the muscles in his legs _and_ his torso, but he fixed all of those injuries before Gai caught him, so as far as Gai knows, Riku got two-thirds of the way through before slipping and tearing his Achilles tendon.

Three days later, Riku snuck away from his medical watchdogs and tried the course again. He made it without breaking anything, but it took close to a dozen run-throughs before he could make it without falling at all, and another six or seven repeat trips before he could do it at ninja speed.

By the time Gai got around to dismantling the course, though, Riku was visiting it every other day and going through it with body flicker just to blow off steam.

Here, in the present, Riku knows better than to give in to that urge. There are three guards blocking the group of “recruits” from moving any further down the hallway, and two more in front of the door. Shifting and checking the hallway behind them in his peripheral, Riku spots four more guards.

Way, way too many. They almost outnumber the recruits, and each guard looks like a fully-trained ninja: adults all, with vests that mark them at least chuunin-rank, weapon-pouches, some with other visible weaponry like sword-sheaths…

One of the two door-guards visibly counts heads before he bangs on the door. After a moment, it slides open without a scrape or a clang.

Inside is…a cafeteria?

Under close observation from the guards, the recruits file in, Riku and Karin just behind the first pair through the door. There are five tables, the two on the right already full and a third with several people at the far end. All the tables are the ridiculously low, traditional style that Riku's only been subjected to a handful of times, only here, there are no cushions for anyone to sit. Just cold stone floor without even a rug.

The boy in front of Karin starts to walk toward the fourth table, while the boy in front of Riku heads to the third table. Karin also moves toward the third, so Riku follows her lead with only a brief hesitation.

A guard already in the room grabs the boy and hauls him over to the third table. He’s pushed down, his forehead smacking into hardwood, and when Riku takes a seat across from him, there’s already an ugly bruise forming.

Karin, next to the boy, doesn’t acknowledge him in any way. Once she’s situated herself in her spot, not so much as twitching at the temperature of the stone under her, she folds her hands in her lap and keeps her head bowed down. Most of the others do the same.

Riku copies Karin, studying the rest of the group out of the corners of his eyes.

They don’t look like genin; genin are more rambunctious, louder, cockier. Even nervous genin like Hinata don’t project the same beaten-down air that Riku gets from this group. It can’t just be the casual violence, because genin tend to be quick to pull knives or put up fists. The hospital gets a lot of traffic from dumb fights genin and Academy students get into; a lot of he-said/she-said, a lot more throw-downs over nebulous concepts like honor and pride.

Naruto’s group is actually really cohesive and cooperative; Riku almost never sees them or hears about them coming in, even for mission-related fuck-ups. Now, for _training_ -related injuries, Riku’s been tempted to start passing out stamp cards. (They all come in with sprains, pulled muscles, things like that. Occasionally worse mishaps involving knives or other weapons.

By about the fourth or fifth visit, most of them pulled Riku aside and arranged some extracurricular tutoring on basic medical jutsu, because it’s just _embarrassing_ to come into the hospital for training injuries only to hear from the nurses and medic-nins, “Look at Riku, _he_ _’s_ training with Maito Gai and he never injures himself!”

Kiba took the longest to clue into the fact that Riku absolutely, unashamedly heals himself rather than report his injuries to the hospital staff he has to work with every day, and Riku _still_ has an outstanding bet with Ino that Shino told him. Ino’s bet was that _Hinata_ said something, but the timing doesn’t work. They’ll have to wait until she gets back from Snow again to be sure, but Riku’s fairly sure the five-hundred-yen pot is his and he plans to collect, even though the breakup will make it hideously awkward.)

Riku’s hallway group fills up the rest of the third table; the tables aren’t all that long, they just seem bigger next to all the seated figures curled in on themselves. No one says anything as the door shuts. They wait. Riku got a good look at the room on his way in, but he didn’t spot any pink heads, or Sasuke’s distinctive haircut, so he counts his breaths, trying not to twitch too visibly at every noise someone else makes.

One of the girls sitting further down the table sneezes. Riku flinches. He’s not the only one.

There are only two guards in the room with them, but one moves to the girl. Before the guard—a woman, this time, just as broad and tall as the others—gets to her, the girl has already ducked away from the table and started counting off push-ups. Precisely correct push-ups. The uniform does little to disguise the muscles in her back: this is a genin who knows taijutsu, whose body is a weapon. Her face is utterly blank.

She’s still counting off into the fifties when the door opens again. Another group, older than most of Riku’s hallway, filters in. This group takes the fourth table without so much as glancing at any of the others. Unlike every other table, that table has chatter, laughter—and the torchlight glints off the metal plates of their forehead-protectors.

No sign of Sasuke or Sakura there either, though.

When that group sits, another guard calls out, “Servers,” and people start standing up from the first three tables.

Karin stands, discretely motions to Riku. He follows her and the boy with the spreading bruise.

They walk to the back corner of the room, to a nondescript door, wood painted to match the stone around it. The woman raps on it, just once; a pause, then the door opens.

All the “servers” have cuts or bruises. A punishment, then? Riku leans toward Karin, but she shuffles away, shooting him a glance like poison.

Through the door is a kitchen, separated from the servers with a wide counter and a thick pane of glass that ends sharply only two inches above it. Through the gap, three cooks about as old as Riku pass the servers trays precariously filled with soup and meat chunks. The trays were obviously not made with liquids in mind: while they have sides, the soup is nearly to the top of them. Karin eyes Riku, then takes a single tray.

Some of the servers grab four trays, balancing the extras carefully on their forearms. Most take two. The smallest servers, including the eleven-year-old kid, take only one.

Riku doesn’t find out what happens if you spill a tray.

There’s an order to serving: the fourth table is served first, and the third table last. By the time he and Karin pass out trays to the others in their hallway, push-up girl is back in place and waiting for them. How they determine how many trays to serve before they get their own, Riku isn’t sure; when he and Karin leave the kitchen with the seventh trays in their hands, she leads him back to the table and sits down.

The soup turns out to be a kind of stew with a soy sauce base, although Riku can’t identify the meat. Not fish, for sure, and not fowl, but is it pork, or beef, or something else? He couldn’t say. It’s a little salty, a little sweet, and probably better when it’s warm; when he starts, it’s on the unpleasant side of room temperature.

There are no forks, no spoons, not even chopsticks: everyone in the cafeteria eats with their hands. No one spills. As they eat, the guards walk between the tables. Occasionally, they shove someone’s face into their tray for a variety of infractions—looking up, holding their head too high, eating too slowly, eating too quickly…

As one of the servers, Riku’s still making it through the meat chunks when most of the rest of the table is finishing theirs. The boy next to him leans down and, without moving the tray, starts slurping up the broth. Riku stares until Karin’s near-silent hisses catch his attention and he grabs a chunk of pink meat, seared brown on the sides, and shoves it in his mouth. He feels more than sees or hears the looming shadow of the guard pass over him without stopping.

When the boy next to him has sucked up about as much of the broth as he can, he resorts to licking the rest up like a cat. He’s not the only one. No one just picks up their tray and drinks it down; no one leaves the liquid on their tray. Karin finishes before Riku does and, just like the boy, tucks her head right above her tray and starts slurping.

It’s undignified; is that the point? The guards aren’t laughing at anybody, aren’t mocking them, are just walking around, watching. Everyone drinks the broth, everyone licks their trays clean. The kids whose faces were shoved into their trays even lick the table clean, run their hands over their cheeks and noses and chins and lick the soup off their fingers and palms.

Does Sound want their captured genin to eat like animals? That’s what they’ve _created_ , and with as heavy a guard presence as there is, it must be what they intended or else they’d stop it. But why? What does that do for Sound?

The fourth table stands while Riku and a few other servers are still working on their breakfast. Without a word, they file out. Then the first table goes. Then the second. The third table stands last and rather than leaving, they pick up all the trays and, in two neat lines, file into the kitchen to return them. One of the cooks takes the trays and deposits them in a soap-and-water-filled sink, where the second cook starts washing. The third stands by with towels.

On closer inspection, the cooks are wearing aprons over the same uniform all the recruits have on.

Trays returned, Riku’s group files back out, then out to the hall. They don’t go back to their rooms, though: they’re led further into the base. They cross two other halls (about fifty and seventy feet from the cafeteria) before taking a right-hand turn and continuing for about another sixty feet before they stop in front of another door, this one marked by a huge window next to it. Inside is both brightly-lit and empty.

The female guard from the cafeteria knocks on the door and it swings open. There are lights in the ceiling and all along the edges of the room, sunken into the floor; the walls are all mirrored, including the space where the window is on the other side. The floor in the center of the room is hard, smooth wood, not the stone of the hallways outside.

Pins and needles through his feet tells him that his feet went numb a while ago without him noticing. A couple others in the group walk gingerly to their places, but most, like Karin, seem unaffected.

Karin pulls Riku along to sit next to her as their group hastily sorts itself into two lines of four, sitting and facing each other. Three more guards come into the room before the door closes: one stands by that door, while another takes up position in the far corner and the remaining two move to either end of the rows of sitting children.

“On my count,” the woman, at the end closer to Riku, shouts. Pause. Then: “Begin!”

The others scramble into push-up position; Riku’s a little too slow and gets kicked in the gut for it. “Faster!” he’s told as he wheezes.

The other guard criticizes a girl’s form: not the one from the cafeteria, whose push-ups are still technically perfect. This girl is maybe Riku’s age, with close-cropped brown hair, sad eyes, and her hands too far apart. The guard points this out with his foot between her shoulder blades. “Closer. Closer! There. Now _push_.”

She strains to push against his weight. When she goes back down, he grinds his foot in a bit and says, “Push, recruit!”

At that, she tries again, and this time manages it. As soon as she does, he takes his foot off her and moves on.

They don’t have to count off, but the ones who go too quickly are scolded and hit; the ones who go too slowly are scolded and hit. Inconsistencies in form are punished; quivering arms and labored breathing attract the guards’ attention.

Riku gets to fifty, then sixty, then seventy, without particular difficulty. He’s trained with Gai; while he can’t match either his teacher or Lee, he can keep up for a little while. He notices Karin start to flag, though, at around the same time the woman notices; he spots her swooping in and his palm “slips.” He “catches” himself and the woman’s attention, which he manages to keep long enough for Karin to catch her own breath and correct her technique. When the woman, deciding that Riku won’t offer her an excuse to kick him, looks at Karin, there are no wobbly elbows, no panting breaths, no excuses to kick her, either.

By the time the man calls out, “Halt!” Riku is nearing one-eighty. He doesn’t let himself collapse face-first onto the floor, although he wants to; he sits up instead, cross-legged like everyone else, and controls his breathing.

Push-up girl’s blonde hair is plastered to her face with sweat, face splotched red. The boy with the bruise, now next to her, visibly trembles. Riku can’t see the small kid, but he can certainly hear the loud panting for air.

“Stand,” the man says, having taken the woman’s position closer to Riku’s end of the rows.

What follows are some basic hand-to-hand drills, palm blocks and high punches. Riku and Karin’s row blocks first, while the other row punches. Then they switch. The moves are all familiar to Riku, which is nice, because at no point do the guards bother with anything like instructions or a demonstration.

Gai would probably have some very unflattering things to say about this method of teaching. He was always adamant that Riku see moves first, before anything else, and then practice them at half speed so Gai could spot and fix any mistakes in form, footing, and so on. Riku spots a dozen problems in his fellow recruits within the first minute, but, given how silent everyone else has been so far, saying any of that would not go over well.

Besides, the guards care less about the correct form and more about the whole row moving in lockstep. When one of the other girls fails to punch at the same tempo as the rest of her row, the woman pulls that row away while the man orders Riku’s row to pair off and continue the drills.

It’s easy enough to match Karin’s tempo, and Riku can split his attention between that and watching the other four recruits. The guard tells them to start their “suicides,” sending Riku’s body into adrenaline-fueled anxiety.

They’re just running, though, and Riku forces his breathing steady to match his and Karin’s strikes.

When he’s calm, he checks again; they sprint until they reach lines on the floor, tap those lines, and sprint back to the starting wall. The lines segment the whole room, so the last lap is from one wall to the other and back. When bruise-boy makes it back to the starting wall, the guard just nods, and the boy starts to walk around the room, obviously cooling down.

The girl in front of Riku, with brown hair past her shoulders and a round, blank face, looks like she didn’t do much taijutsu before her capture; Riku would bet that some of the captured genin throw up the first time they try to sprint like that without any chakra backing them.

No bet on whether they’d be punished for it, too.

The little boy messes up next, hand too close to his body when he tries to block, so Karin’s punch lands on his shoulder. It’s a good, solid swing, with enough force behind it to rock the boy backwards. His row is pulled and the lines reform, Karin now across from Riku.

Even the lockstep isn’t the point; Riku can’t think of any way that a line of people hitting or blocking in unison would be useful to Sound. But a line of people moving and even _thinking_ in unison, because they know that if they don’t, they’ll be punished? That might be one way to turn kidnapped genin into a functional shinobi corps, if not a loyal one.

There must be some way to weed out the ones who do poorly, and the ones who are otherwise skilled but don’t fall in line. Riku wonders if _that_ _’s_ why Sakura and Sasuke are nowhere to be found.

Eventually, bruise-boy, now next to Riku, punches too high. The guard catches it and walks the three of them over to run suicides. As far as Riku can tell, you have to conform when you’re in the rows, but when you’re being punished, it’s every ninja for themselves. He wastes no time: as soon as the guard tells them to start, he’s off.

It isn’t much of an obstacle course; even having to spin around and run back loses its novelty after he figures out how to do it quickly, without losing too much momentum. (He’ll have to practice this when he gets back to Konoha and can try it while body-flickering; if he gets it down, then misjudging distances will never be a problem again, because he can just reorient and keep going. Really, that should’ve occurred to him a long time ago, he’s just been so _busy_ …)

By the time the other two finish their suicides, Riku’s walked a lap around the room and gotten his breathing back to normal. They go back to the drills, a little sloppier with the physical strain.

Riku estimates that the guards run them through that for a full hour, maybe even an hour and a half, before taking them back into the hall and backtracking to the first crossing. Riku notes each turn they make as the group is ultimately led to a bathroom.

“Go,” is all Karin can whisper to him as they’re led into different rooms. There are guards in both. They’re given two minutes to take care of business, and then they’re taken back into the hall (the small kid barely has enough time to tug his pants back up) and once more led down a long hall.

This time, the room has a single table with chairs. They sit down.

“Hands behind your backs,” they’re told, and when they do that, have their hands tied.

The rope around Riku’s wrists chafes. The first restraint is simple: three times around their wrists, then knotted.

“You have ten minutes,” the guard says, “ _begin_.”

The kid is out in one; Karin, beside him, is the second fastest. Riku finishes third to last, because it takes him longer than the others to find the best angle to use the solid corner of the chair to saw through the rope.

The slowest kid stands and moves next to the door, white-faced and trembling.

“Hands behind your backs,” they’re told again.

This time, Riku holds his hands deliberately a little wider, which does him no good when the guard ties his wrists together in a figure-eight pattern. He saws this off and, having gotten the trick down, finishes about in the middle. Again, the slowest person, the girl with long brown hair, is sent to stand by the door.

The third round, the guards bend their forearms and tie those together. A couple kids slip off their chairs to try sawing away at it; Riku nudges Karin with his knee and, when she looks at him, raises his eyebrows and nods at her restraints. She shrugs and turns her back on him.

He could try to get her free using his hands, but the problem is that he wouldn’t have much more maneuverability to get her free than to just get himself free. Instead, he kneels on the ground and applies his teeth to the knot, tugging at it regardless of how much his jaw protests. When she’s free, she doesn’t hesitate, grabbing him by the shoulder of his shirt and turning him around so she can attack his restraints.

She finishes fastest that round, with him and push-up girl tying for second; push-up girl got the other girl to help her and returned the favor while Riku, rather than sitting smugly like Karin seems content to do, applies himself to the nearest person still bound.

Bruise-boy doesn’t make it, although Riku’s most of the way through his restraints when the guard calls time. He shoots Riku a shrug and an expression that might be an attempt at a smile before walking over to the door.

The bindings this time go around the chest, and Riku takes the most unobtrusive deep breath he can manage, holding it until the guard tells them to begin. He lets out his breath at that signal, and the ropes go slack enough for him to just step out of them.

Karin did the same, and they finish more or less at the same time. Riku helps push-up girl, while Karin, with a roll of her eyes, unties the little kid’s knot. In under three minutes, the whole table is free. They all look at the guards, nervousness in most everyone’s faces and postures.

The guards don’t send anyone to stand by the door. Instead, one of them, the woman, takes those three out into the hall while Riku’s group waits.

At some unseen signal, the guard nods, and then says, “Follow me.”

Next up is a throwing range; from Riku’s mental map, it’s next to the sparring room, though the halls have started bleeding into one another. Like the sparring room, this one has plenty of light, although no mirrored walls, just wooden posts with person-shaped targets on the far side of the room. Like the sparring room, this one has lines painted on the floor: there are lanes for each target post separated by long vertical stripes of black on the wood floor, and then there are horizontal green lines at even intervals across all the lanes.

Eyeballing it, Riku estimates that the intervals are close to the suicide-intervals of the training room.

The guard who escorted them takes position by the door, while two guards already in the room pass out blunted knives to the five of them. Riku tests his; like the Academy practice knives, these will throw similarly to real knives, but less dangerous. He could still stab the guards with it, it would just take a lot more force to go anywhere; without chakra to enhance his strikes and against guards armed with _real_ knives, he doesn’t stand a chance.

Even with his key, he might not. It’d depend on whether the key could unlock the seals. Doing that in the middle of a room full of people would _definitely_ get him on Tsunade’s shit-list, though.

They each get a stack of a dozen knives, and one of the guards says, “Throw!”

Sure enough, when his throw is a little slower than everyone else’s, one of the two guards barks out, “Third row, suicides!”

The others continue to throw as he makes it to the first line; no one’s throwing in his lane, but it’s still disconcerting to hear knives slicing through the air around him. He makes it back to his place in time for someone else’s throw to miss the target entirely.

This continues; at one point, the only person throwing rather than running is Karin.

Then they’re handed _shuriken_ and the process repeats. The shuriken, also blunted, feel different in his hand, and Riku has far, far less experience (almost none) with these. At best, he can keep his throws from landing in anyone else’s lane, but all of them fall short or are too high or have too little power and glance off the target rather than piercing it. He spends more time running than throwing, and he isn’t the only one.

Last is _senbon_ , and not even Karin gets one of those into the target, which is for the best; given how terrible everyone’s aim is, if someone had hit the target, it would be by luck, and their second throw could very well hit one of the others instead.

From the range, they’re taken to another large room, this one with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining the walls and comfortable-looking chairs and couches scattered throughout. The guards tell them they have half an hour. Two guards stand at the door. There are no windows.

As soon as the doors shut, two of the others—push-up girl and the little kid—head straight for chairs, sinking down with audible sighs and looking like they’ll nap for the whole thirty minutes. The other girl glances after them, looks at Riku and Karin, then starts examining the nearest bookshelf. Karin sniffs and heads for the bookshelf across the room, towing Riku along after her by the sleeve.

“We’re allowed to talk in here,” Karin tells him. “Library time is a privilege.”

Interesting. Riku wonders if this is it, or if there are other privileges, to go along with the wide range of punishments.

“How’d we earn it?”

“Getting to senbon, I think,” Karin says. “As soon as everyone’s running, the group’s done.” She frowns at him. “How were you still running so fast? Are you a courier?”

Riku laughs. “No. One of my teachers back home was just…really intense.” Gai would consider today a good workout, and then expect his students to complete a couple missions or learn a new jutsu on top of it.

And Lee would be able to do it all while wearing weights; Tenten, while creating and using seals to supply and then store her weapons; Neji, while…well, while helping Shikamaru and Hinata redesign the government of a foreign nation. In a straight-up fight, Riku would bet on any of those three over pretty much anyone else, genin or chuunin. Combined, he wouldn’t be surprised if the three of them could take on jounin. Their goal, last Riku checked, is to pay Uchiha Itachi back for their teacher’s injury; Gai has long since recovered as much as the medics say he ever will, but his team hasn’t let it go.

Which is part of why Riku is sometimes cavalier about his _own_ use of shadow clones to complete his medical readings and train with Tenten and Gai. He and Naruto are counting on using Itachi to lure Sasuke out, which means they have to be good enough to _survive_ using Uchiha Itachi as bait. Riku needs to get on their level as soon as possible if he’s going to keep his promise to Naruto, and he doesn’t have time to waste.

This mission to Sound is _kind of_ a waste of time, unless Sakura and Sasuke are here. The physical training Sound has set up is better than nothing, though. Riku will almost certainly be able to join his team at the Chuunin Exams, provided he can talk Mariko into going along with them after all this.

Riku doesn’t tell Karin any of that. For one thing, she doesn’t need to know, and for another, _Sound_ doesn’t need to know, and Riku has no idea what kind of surveillance they’re all under.

“Huh.” With a shrug, Karin dismisses that and moves on. “Look, the rules here are simple. We’re recruits, they’re training us. When you mess up, you get punished; if you mess up in training, your team gets punished. During meals, though, that’s just on you.”

“That’s messed up,” he says; Karin twitches, but the guards at the door don’t. “Who were all the other people in the cafeteria?”

She shrugs again. “Other recruits, I guess. The last table are actual Sound genin.”

Riku’s eyes narrow. That was a decently-sized group, but they’re outnumbered almost three-to-one. “Everyone else was captured?”

“Something like that. Look, it’s rude to ask, all right? Just don’t do it. No one will ask you, either, and it’s better that way.”

Lowering his voice, Riku asks, “Has anyone gotten out? Escaped, or rescued?”

She stares at him for a long moment. Neither of them looks at the guards. “No,” she says, with finality, and then, “You can take one book or scroll with you, but you have to return it the next time we have library privileges, and if you forget it in the room, that’s on you. Pick something useful.” She grabs his wrist, and at first, he thinks she's trying to slip him a note in the most obvious way possible, but she just turns his wrist over so the inside faces up.

On the delicate, paler skin above the veins sits the seal he hasn’t had a chance to look at yet. She turns her wrist over to reveal the same mark.

“They’re training us,” she says in a quiet voice, “but not to use jutsu, because we can’t. This is the difference between us and the Sound genin. They don’t have seals that drain any chakra they try to use.”

And there’s the carrot: commit to Sound, _really_ commit, become a Sound genin, and you get your chakra back.

“Pick something useful,” Karin repeats. “I’d recommend anything you can find on seal theory.”

///

If Riku were in charge of Sound, he would make sure none of the books or scrolls in the library had anything to do with seals or sealing. He probably wouldn’t even let his captured prisoners have library access, actually, just in case. Nevertheless, he finds two promising scrolls and a Beginner’s Introduction to Sealing that, while unlikely to have any useful techniques, seems like a good place to start.

When the half-hour is close to over, push-up girl wakes up from her nap and introduces herself as Emi. She eyes Riku’s book with resignation.

“We’ve all read that one,” she tells him. “But you might as well try yourself.”

The little boy, Takuma, collects an illustrated history of the Elemental Countries; Karin finds an anatomy textbook that looks suspiciously like the one Riku learned out of in Konoha, although he doesn't mention that. The other girl neither introduces herself nor explains why she picked a scroll bound with a delicate blue ribbon. (Her name, according to Karin and Emi, is Yukiko; Karin says she’s overly sensitive, while Emi says that she and Karin were roommates until Karin drove her to a public breakdown. Neither of them explains what that means, and Karin doesn’t deny it.)

For dinner, they sit at the second table and none of their small group are servers. None of the other six from their hall are at the tables when they get there, and although Riku looks for them, he doesn’t see them sit at the third table, either.

The last table, it turns out, is for special guests. Riku recognizes Orochimaru and Yakushi Kabuto from the Bingo Book; they walk in with half a dozen others and sit down.

They get to talk while they eat. They also get served first, of course.

Dinner is meat and rice with vegetables and sauce. Based on calorie estimates, their portion sizes should be bigger; the trays could certainly accommodate it. (The special guests get actual plates; Riku can hear the tiny clinks of their chopsticks against porcelain.)

No one spills a tray at dinner, either, and after dinner, they’re taken back to the bathrooms. They get ten minutes to handle their business and shower; the guards supply a single towel to each person and a single bar of soap to the group as a whole, and loudly announce how much time is left every thirty seconds. Riku leaves his book on top of a sink where he can keep an eye on it without risking it getting wet; damaging it would probably get him punished, and he wouldn’t put it past the guards here to make him “lose” his book and then get punished for it.

The bar of soap makes its way to everyone; it’s a group shower, with no room or time for modesty or embarrassment.

When they get out, there are sets of clean clothes laying on the floor in front of the showers, although Riku was watching and never saw the guard put it there. Once dressed, the guard shepherds them back to their bedrooms, where they get half an hour of “quiet time.”

“You’re not religious, are you?” Karin asks as soon as the door’s shut. She speaks quietly, but she isn’t whispering. “Yukiko is. She prays to her dead mother every night. If you do that, I’ll kill you.”

“My mom’s not dead,” Riku says, then shrugs. “And I’m not really religious, anyway.” Believing in Leviathan is a matter of faith, not prayer. Besides, this far away from any moving water, any prayers he says have little chance of reaching their destination.

He could pray to someone else—Bahamut will always hear you, although he rarely responds, and Valefor just needs air; Ixion prefers an open sky, which Riku has about as much as he has moving water—but they aren’t really _his_  gods. His god isn’t the kind to step in and offer a divine solution, anyway.

The ocean endures. Tides come in, tides go out, and the ocean remains. Human troubles are fleeting in the face of immense bodies of water and history.

“Oh good.” She sounds a little sarcastic, but not as much as this morning. “Well, if you don’t bother me, I won’t have to hurt you.”

Riku lets that go without comment—she could, probably, if she waited until they got to the throwing range—and opens his book.

///

After thirty minutes, Riku’s brain no longer wants to try to process characters, let alone anything more complicated like seal theory. He expects that the dim lights in their ceiling will automatically go out, but instead, as the thirty-minute mark approaches, Karin becomes increasingly tense.

He makes the mistake of asking about it and gets his head bitten off.

His questions are answered when, at as close to half an hour as he can tell, doors start opening. The whole hall is quiet enough that he can hear them, and hear other recruits crying as, by the sounds, they’re dragged off.

Then his door opens, and the guards wordlessly grab him by the arms and drag him out. There’s no pretense of control or consent: they don’t ask, don't demand, don’t even try to get him to stand and walk under his own power. They just haul him off.

Down the hall, in the opposite direction from the cafeteria, until they reach a nondescript door. One guard raps her knuckles against it and it swings open, revealing a room with a scratched, wooden table and three chairs, a bare bulb hanging dramatically over the scene.

Shoved into one chair, Riku looks up to see one of the guards leave the room. The other stands by the door.

He waits and waits. He tries to get up and the guard comes over to him; even though he’s back in the seat by the time she reaches him, she still takes the opportunity to bang his head into the table.

“Let’s not abuse our guests,” a smooth voice says from the doorway, and the guard instantly backs off, bowing and murmuring apologies.

Riku blinks, making sure his vision isn’t swimming. If he could use chakra, he could make sure he doesn’t have a concussion, could fix it if he did—but he can’t use chakra, and it was just a smack, really. He's hit his head worse and been fine. (Ms. Honda will murder him if he comes back to Konoha with any sort of traumatic brain injury, but she'll also fix it, so he figures that's fair.)

Once he’s sure that he’s settled, he looks up to see Yakushi Kabuto in the doorway, smiling at him, glasses catching the light from the bulb and flashing ominously.

“Hello, Hatake Riku,” he says. “I’m glad to finally meet you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I wanna establish right off the bat that I'm not gonna talk about who you, the reader, should trust in this story. I'm just gonna suggest that maybe Riku isn't the only one here under false pretenses.
> 
> Also, hey, quick note: I made a timeline for this series, swapped the Mist and Sand Chuunin Exams (so the Sand ones will happen, as per canon, in January of the year after this fic takes place), and right now, it's looking like I can get the official start of the Fourth Ninja War to line up more or less with KH3? I'm not sure if I want to adjust things to make that work, or bump one or the other--I'll have to wait until I've played KH3 to see. But yeah, I'm excited about that! I'm working on the Chuunin Exams fic right now, and my plan is to have enough of that done to start posting it when this one finishes.
> 
> Right now, the next update looks like it'll be **Janury 12th** , but if I have to move that back, I'll post an ETA on my [tumblr](http://heraldaros.tumblr.com/) and my [DreamWidth](https://heraldaros.dreamwidth.org/).


	3. Boundaries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 2 of Sound infiltration: Riku's not any closer to finding out anything about Sakura or Sasuke, but he has a better idea of what's going on with Sound's "recruits." (He still doesn't like it one bit.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warnings for this chapter** : bodily harm; casual physical violence, including corporal punishment for minor infractions and physical abuse in a teaching/training setting; threatened bodily harm/death in an interrogation setting.

Kabuto has a mild smile and the competent, no-nonsense air of most of the medic-nin Riku’s interacted with. There’s no stress in his shoulders, no tenseness to his hands. He crosses the room and takes the seat across from Riku without hurrying, his eyes slipping away from Riku’s only to examine the rest of his face.

He clicks his tongue as he eyes the tender spot—bruised, then, or at least reddened—and then he raises one hand.

Riku flinches.

Kabuto doesn’t mention it, merely raises his other hand to grab and hold Riku’s chin as he brushes the bruise. His fingers are cold and firm. Riku feels the medical jutsu connect without any ability to stop or redirect it—something even novice medic-nin learn is now beyond him.

Without healing the spot, Kabuto releases him and leans back. Riku blinks, then eyes him, tense and wary. If the point of that wasn’t to build goodwill—look, we can be nice!—then he was probably just checking to make sure Riku isn’t concussed.

Still, without access to his chakra, Riku _could_ be under genjutsu now. He can’t trust his senses. There’s a limit to how long a genjutsu can hold, but theoretically, you can supplement the original caster’s reserves with more chakra and keep the genjutsu going, so long as there’s no other interruption.

Riku doesn’t look forward to having to hurt himself as soon as he gets back to his room, but it’s one of the few ways to get out of a genjutsu once you’re in one, and the only method Riku can think of that doesn’t require chakra. (Besides his key, which certainly broke Itachi’s genjutsu hold over Sasuke—Riku isn’t sure it would work from _inside_ the genjutsu, and anyway, he isn’t about to pull it out in front of Karin.)

According to the Bingo Book entry Tsunade included in the mission file, Kabuto is almost as skilled in genjutsu as he is in medical jutsu.

“You seem to be acclimating well,” Kabuto says. Riku snorts, and one of Kabuto’s eyebrows ticks up. “You don’t agree?”

“I’ve been here a day,” he says, fingers twitching, impatient to be sure he isn’t speaking to an illusion. “It’s a little soon to say that kinda thing, don’t you think?”

Kabuto’s smile is serene and entirely fake; his eyes are cold. “You’d be amazed at what careful observation can determine in even a day.”

 _Careful observation_ must be spy-speak for _all-day monitoring_. The sparring room had a window, but there could be any number of cameras through the base. Or Kabuto could be bluffing to throw Riku off.

“Why does Sound want _me_ , anyway?”

Kabuto laughs. “What an assumption. Sound _doesn_ _’t_ want you. You’re here because someone saw an opportunity, and we might find some use for you.”

Riku doesn’t buy that for a second, and his face must show it. He was snatched out of a _guarded outpost_ , for Leviathan’s sake—even if he didn’t know that Sound wanted Mariko, he’d assume that level of effort meant something.

The humor drains out of Kabuto’s face, leaving his expression cold and terrifying. “We might not have any use for you. Understand one thing, Hatake Riku: you are here at our mercy. If we decide that you have no value, we _will_ discard you.”

That, he doesn’t doubt for a second. (Is that why Sakura and Sasuke…? No, couldn’t be. Not _both_. Surely not.) Riku swallows. “Got it.”

Like a mask, a smile slides onto Kabuto’s face. His eyes even crinkle, though the faint aura of menace remains. Supplemented by genjutsu, or just naturally that potent? It would be useful if Riku had more experience, to compare this to a baseline for either Kabuto specifically or genjutsu in general. “Excellent. Tell me, what did you find challenging about your first day? I can’t say our program measures up to Maito Gai’s standards, but most genin are hardly ready for that level of rigor, wouldn’t you agree?”

It takes a second for Riku to parse that he’s been asked a question, and that Kabuto really does want an answer. “I…guess,” he tries, and flinches at Kabuto’s sigh.

“What did you find challenging,” Kabuto repeats, eyes narrowed, smile sharp.

“The senbon.” That seems safe enough: if Kabuto’s in charge of the recruits in any way, he already knows that Riku’s group struggled with those. If he was watching personally, or had security tapes, or even if he just got a report…

Kabuto’s expression softens. “Ah, yes, senbon. Many ninja find it difficult to wield them. I suppose you must not have trained with Katou Shizune, then?” Riku shakes his head, and Kabuto gives a little sigh. “Too bad. Was that all?”

Riku thinks about it. Given Kabuto’s comment about Gai, they have some intel on him; given the question about Shizune, though, it isn’t _that_ much. Riku can’t remember even talking to the Hokage’s assistant and can’t imagine any agent in the village would have the impression that they know one another. This is one more way to get information out of him. The whole day has doubtlessly been one test after another, gauging the recruits’ abilities and then stretching them.

He thinks it over too long, because Kabuto, with another sigh, pushes his chair back and stands.

“Well, if that’s all you have to say…” He raises his eyebrows, like Riku might have something else to offer. He doesn’t. Kabuto shakes his head slowly. “We aren’t your enemy anymore, Riku. You should learn that quickly.” He walks to the door, pausing before stepping through. To the guard, he says, “Ten minutes should be sufficient.”

Then he leaves, door closing with a terribly loud click.

Riku counts his heartbeats, stalling out at three hundred from boredom. He doesn’t try to get up, but tests the boundaries by tipping his chair onto its back legs. The guard doesn’t twitch. He leans forward, front legs slamming into the floor with a loud noise, and the guard scowls at him but doesn’t comment or move.

Taking the scowl as a warning, though, Riku refrains from making noises. He studies the table: wood, sturdy, scratches on his side. He lays one hand along one set of scratches. The scratches line up pretty well with his fingers, a little more closely-spaced. The scratches go against the grain, and Riku tries not to think about splinters in nail beds and infections.

How many others have sat here before him, and what has Sound done to them, to make them scratch like that? Has Karin ever been here, is this where those scars on her arms come from?

Was Sakura ever in this chair, staring at these walls? Was Sasuke?

Riku wants the answers to these questions, but only if the answers are all _no_. Not knowing might be better than knowing and having to live with that.

Knowing, and having to live with the fact that there’s nothing he can do about it.

With nothing better to do, he bites the pad of his left thumb until he draws blood, then digs a nail into the wound. It hurts, that’s the point, but he’s not sure how much he needs it to hurt before he can be sure he’s not in a genjutsu. Until he’s allowed out of the room seems as good a plan as any.

The guard doesn’t say anything when ten minutes is up, just opens the door. Riku wastes no time getting up and walking through it, wiping his thumb on his pants and trying to ignore the throb; she closes the door behind him with more force than Kabuto used, then escorts him back to his room with a hand on his shoulder but without trying to drag him this time.

As he passes rooms in the hall, he hears sniffles and whimpers, smells blood. The guard opens the door to his room and pushes him in, then closes it.

The lights in the room have dimmed while he was out, illuminating just enough for him to make out shapes and colors. Karin lays on her side facing away from the door, breathing shallowly, left arm cradled against her chest.

Riku sits down on his own futon, cross-legged, and examines her back. If she were his patient—not that he has patients of his own yet, of course, but if he was assisting Ms. Honda or Anzu with her—he’d say she was in pain. Even in silhouette, her back and shoulders look too tense, her breathing sounds too measured. She definitely isn’t asleep.

Is not knowing better than knowing, and having to deal with it? Could he have prevented this? He can’t think _how_ , but that could be a failure of imagination.

With half his attention on the door and the other half on her, he kneels in the space between their beds, leaning as close to her as he can get without invading her personal space. “Can we talk?” he murmurs as quietly as he thinks he can and still be heard.

Her breath hitches and she rolls onto her back, hair fanning out on her pillow, eyes bloodshot and face blotchy.

When she moves, he registers an antiseptic smell, sudden and intense with proximity, before the bandage wrapped around her left forearm, the basic splint.

He eyes that, then looks up. She mouths something, but unfortunately, whatever lets him understand speech doesn’t work on lip-reading. He shakes his head, and she rolls her eyes but says, quiet as a breath, “Broken.”

Stifling the surge of questions _that_ word summons (Where on the arm? No smell of blood means it must not have broken skin, but is it a complete break or only partial? Just in one place or in multiple? Is this the first time her arm’s been broken, and if not, what’s the medical history on her past breaks?), he tries to match her volume when he asks, “Why?”

She groans and raises her uninjured arm, poking him in the chest.

He blinks. “Me?”

Nod.

“ _Why_?” She glares, and he looks at the door, muscles tensing, ready to fling himself onto his futon and fake sleep. No one materializes; the doorknob doesn’t rattle; the hallway is empty of footsteps.

She shrugs, then hisses. “P’ss’d’m off,” she says, slurring the word into near-incomprehensibility.

Her jaw clenches when she shifts and it jostles her arm. A thought occurs to Riku. “Will you still train tomorrow?” he whispers.

She nods.

“Shit.” There’s no way she’ll be able to do _push-ups_ with that arm; she might be able to throw, since it isn’t her dominant side, but blocking and punching are both out. Even running suicides will be risky, and if Riku were in charge of her recovery, he’d disallow them. Yesterday, he was tapping the ground with whichever hand was closest, and besides, running uses the arms more than some people think.

“Go to sleep,” she tells him quietly. “Can’t do anything.”

“Sure I can,” he says, not willing to let this go. Broken arms are—well, they’re the one thing Riku knows about, inside and out, with chakra and without. Healing broken arms is personal for him, even chakra-exhausted, blind, with his hands tied behind his back, coaching someone else through the procedure.

The splint looks okay, from what he can see, but he’d like more light to say for sure. A cast would be better, unless the break is minor, and he has no faith that Sound would break someone’s arm gently. The lack of blood is reassuring, but he isn’t sure why she’s got antiseptic on it if the skin isn’t broken—unless the antiseptic smell is something analgesic. Would Sound care about numbing the pain they themselves caused their recruits?

She waves this off, and when Riku doesn’t back down, she plants her good hand on his face and shoves him, sprawling backward, onto his futon. “You can’t do anything,” she tells him, speaking slowly and quietly. “Just go to sleep.”

“I could,” he says, more to himself than her, but in this light, with her hair in her face and her eyes wide and dark, she looks serious. Not like someone he wants to cross. And if this is his fault, then he owes her this much. He stops pressing and rolls over; after a few breaths, he hears her settle down as well.

///

There are storm clouds gathering on the horizon, tainting the late-afternoon sky. Waiting for a sunset is pointless in that mess: no one wants to watch a blood-red sky with the crash of thunder and darkness.

Waves smash choppily on the shore, forerunners of the foul weather, and Riku rolls off the paopu tree with a sigh. Sailing in storms isn’t fun, it’s exhausting and nerve-wracking. Even worse when there are other people—

Iron-smell hits his nose, faint in the wake of the salt from the sea. He turns in the direction it comes from. The Secret Place shouldn’t smell like metal and it definitely shouldn’t smell like blood.

The scent grows thicker with each step he takes toward the cave, until he can see it. The spring next to the entrance is pink, darker red radiating outward from the trail of blood-stained bandages unraveling from one pale, blood-smeared arm.

Kairi’s back is straight, unbowed, her other hand tucked into her chest where he can’t see it.

When he wakes up, Riku doesn’t remember what comes next, which is a mercy: he recognizes the feeling, the rhythm, the pattern of the dreams where he dies.

///

The next morning, clean clothes lay on either side of the door. Karin grabs Riku’s and throws them at his face with her good arm, telling him to turn around on pain of a broken nose.

He turns. With nothing better to do, he strips and dresses in the clean clothes. Karin takes longer, struggling with the splint; he waits for her to say, “Fine, you can look now,” before he turns back around.

Her sleep-clothes (identical to the set she now has on) are in a pile at her feet, and she toes at her shirt with a sneer. Then she turns that sneer on Riku. “This is _your_ fault,” she tells him, “so you should fold these.”

“Do we have to?” he asks, and she nods, so with a sigh he gives in and does it.

Once both their shirts and pants are folded—she watches and critiques him, making him redo it until each article of clothing is a perfect, crisp square—he sets them on either side of the door. Then she carefully adjusts the position of her pillow, glaring poison at him until he does the same. Then she sits on her futon and says, “They’ll be here soon. _Don_ _’t_ fuck up, and if they do anything to me, _don_ _’t_ get involved.”

Hoping there’s enough time for an answer, he asks, “Why’d they break your arm?”

She sniffs and glares at him again. “You must have pissed them off. I _told_ you, if you fuck up, someone else pays for it.”

“During _training_ ,” he starts to protest, but then the door opens—no sign of a key turning in a lock, so either they don’t lock recruits in or the lock is chakra-based, and on second thought, if Riku had a bunch of chakra-sealed genin kidnapped in his base, he would _definitely_ make all the locks chakra-based—and Riku, remembering the previous day, waits for the guard to say, “Up, recruits,” and then follows Karin’s example of standing and bowing.

Karin refuses to give him any more information on the way to the cafeteria, ignoring Riku’s whispered questions and only looking at him to glare. The increased light in the hallway gives him a better view of the splint, which looks like a professional’s work; most non-medical chuunin and jounin can pull that off, since it’s a question of practice more than anything else, but a genin’s work is usually sloppier.

Either Karin has a medical background, or whoever broke that arm also splinted it. Riku asks, but she doesn’t answer.

Once again, they’re both servers. Breakfast this time is some kind of rice porridge with meat chunks, chicken by the smell. Without the threat of slopping liquid over the sides, most of the servers risk two trays at a time; only Karin and Riku take single trays out.

Lukewarm rice and meat are more palatable than yesterday’s breakfast, so Riku doesn’t mind being the last one to eat. Karin inhales breakfast, and, like before, everyone licks their trays clean.

In the training room, Karin struggles to do push-ups one-handed. While Riku tries to redirect attention his way, there’s little he can do when she falls face-first onto the floor. For their efforts, they both get boots in between their shoulder blades, but nothing worse.

The hand-to-hand drills are a joke with her arm the way it is: whichever row she’s in does suicides the whole time, and Riku makes sure he sticks next to her. Running isn’t much hardship for him, and it isn’t like he needs to drill on basic forms like these. If he closes his eyes, he can picture complete _kata_ that Tenten has drilled him on, from the bow at the beginning to the bow at the end.

These moves are building blocks; he can see why Sound has started with them. But Riku’s well past the foundations of taijutsu, and frankly, he could do a better job leading these drills than the guards who bark orders. Building stamina is a huge part of taijutsu, but the way the guards assign suicides is closer to abuse than training, especially given Karin’s arm. (She isn’t the only injured kid in the room, just the worst case; there are enough scrapes and bruises in this room to get them all sent home with orders of taking it easy for a couple days. How many of the kidnapped genin have already had breakdowns, physical exhaustion combined with injury combined with mental turmoil taking its inevitable toll?

From Kabuto’s words yesterday, Riku would guess any breakdowns resulted in Sound getting rid of the victim.)

The other girl in their row, the only one whose name he doesn’t know yet, is red-faced, panting, looking almost nauseated from the exertion by the time the guards call a halt and take them all to the room to practice escaping restraints. Wasn’t she struggling yesterday, too? This really isn’t an effective way to teach taijutsu. Riku has been almost sick while training before, but he never felt as beaten-down as this girl looks.

In the next room, Karin winces when her hands are tied, so Riku gets out of the rope as quickly as possible and then gets hers off. Ten minutes, when he knows what he’s doing, is enough time for him to move on to the others, getting Yukiko and Takuma’s ropes off. The others do the same, freedom fanning out around the table. No one is still tied up when the guard calls time. No one goes to the door.

In the next round, with the figure-eight ties, they all escape. Yukiko winds up unable to get free of the forearm-restraints. The last round, Takuma joins her at the door, but everyone else gets free. With those two taken off to who-knows-where, the seven remaining—Riku, Karin, Emi, bruise-boy from yesterday, the last girl from their hall, and one more boy Riku hasn’t interacted with—are escorted to the throwing range.

Karin maneuvers herself into the very last row, with Riku between her and the others; he didn’t think her injury would affect her aim with the other hand, but it does. She falters and her throws land off-target. She runs suicides, and Riku struggles to keep pace with the others without sacrificing accuracy. He can’t afford for a stray hit to go _too_ wide.

Throw slowly and you run suicides; fail to hit the target and you run; throw too quickly, and you mess up the rhythm for everyone _else_ , usually making the rest of the row run for your mistake.

Either Sound is trying to make them hate each other, or they’re trying to make a unit of perfectly in-sync ninja. Maybe both.

They don’t get to senbon without Karin’s stellar aim, so they don’t go to the library. Instead, the guards walk them back to the first training room. Instead of lining up or anything, though, the group splinters. Once again, Emi collapses, this time directly onto the floor and joined by bruise-boy. Karin rolls her eyes at them and starts jogging slowly around the room. The other girl pulls a rolled-up scroll out of her waistband, unfurling it to reveal a pencil and a half-complete sketch of the Hokage Rock.

Riku tries not to stare at her too intently; he didn’t get files on the missing Konoha genin, let alone pictures, possibly because Tsunade knew that he would try to get them out. He must not succeed at hiding his interest, though, because Karin interrupts her lap to head for him, grabbing his sleeve and tugging him after her.

“Do _not_ start anything with Yakumo,” she tells him.

“Is that her name?” Riku isn’t the best at names, so he can’t place it, but if he got a family name, he might…

“ _Don_ _’t_ ,” is all Karin says, not releasing his sleeve for another lap around the room.

“Why not?”

He’s starting to think that her face is too comfortable scowling; were he her medic-nin, he would prescribe some mandatory time with someone like Lee or Naruto, who are constitutionally incapable of not brightening other people’s days. Maybe Anzu first, to soften her up.

“She isn’t safe for you to talk to,” Karin says finally, grudgingly, like she didn’t want to admit to that much. For her trouble, Riku smiles and says, “Alright,” with zero intention of following that advice for very long, but no plans to wander over and start up a conversation with Yakumo right away.

Eyeing him suspiciously, like she knows that was too easy and therefore fake, Karin keeps hold of his sleeve for another few laps.

“Hey,” he says quietly, after giving her some time to cool down. She stares at him warily, but tips her head in his direction, which he takes as a cue to go on, “you’ve been here a while, right?” A nod, this time, wariness still all over her expression. “So, if I gave you someone’s name, would you know whether or not they were here?”

She nearly trips as she loses her rhythm. She isn’t moving that quickly, but Riku catches her by the elbow of her uninjured arm, not willing to risk her rolling her ankle or anything like that.

“Maybe,” she says, as quietly as his question, when they’re moving again. “I haven’t seen everyone. Who do you want to know about?”

“Uchiha Sasuke,” he says, as under his breath as he can; sibilants carry farther than other sounds, and he doesn’t want to catch anyone else’s attention.

A pause, and then she shakes her head.

“What about Haruno Sakura?”

Another pause. This one feels longer, but Riku can’t be sure. She shakes her head again.

“You sure?”

That earns him a venomous look. “Of course I’m sure.”

He holds up his hands, universal signal for _I’m unarmed, don’t attack!_ Changing the subject seems to mollify her; when he asks, she tells him that the two boys are Keisuke (bruise-boy) and Hiroshi; that Keisuke has only been here a day longer than Riku, while most of the others have been here for at least a few weeks already.

Hiroshi does push-ups on the other side of the room from the nappers and Yakumo. Riku observes his form, then breaks away from Karin to offer a couple pointers.

“Fuck off,” is what he’s told, before he can even open his mouth.

Riku pauses, considers. Behind him, Karin stops where she is, but doesn’t move closer. In his peripheral, he catches Yakumo looking up.

Instead of what he was going to say, Riku drops down and demonstrates the proper form. There’s no indication Hiroshi is paying him any attention until, with a grunt, he puts one hand behind his back.

Riku isn’t Rock Lee, but he isn’t about to back down from a challenge. He puts his own hand behind his back.

Hiroshi rolls over and starts a set of crunches. Riku matches him; as a medic-nin, he’s aware that crunches are not the best or safest of exercises, but as someone in the middle of a challenge, he has a point to make.

Hiroshi moves into lunges, so Riku does lunges. Hiroshi runs suicides, so Riku runs suicides, and that’s Hiroshi’s mistake, because Riku is _great_ at running, even after a full day of it. He’s caught his second wind now; he is _ready_ for this. Hiroshi is…not.

He collapses, panting, and doesn’t have the energy to protest when Riku aborts his last run and heads over to him. He doesn’t even have the energy to push Riku away when Riku grabs his sleeve and tugs him up and into a slow jog.

“Your muscles will seize if you just stop there,” he says, a little out of breath. “C’mon.”

A few laps are enough to even out Hiroshi’s breathing and heart rate. They’re also enough for Keisuke and Emi to rouse from their naps and stare. Karin, a few steps behind for the jog, takes up position at Riku’s elbow when he and Hiroshi stop.

Hiroshi stares at Riku with blatant suspicion. “How’d you do all that?”

“Practice.”

“I thought you were a medic,” Emi calls, catching sudden attention from the whole room.

That attention swiftly swings back to Riku. Hiroshi’s face is slack with shock. “How’s a _medic_ learn all that?”

Riku shrugs. “Like I said, practice. That’s all it is. Look, do you want help or not?”

Hiroshi’s back to suspicious, but Keisuke jumps in with, “Hey, have you practiced the blocks and punches? Could you show me?” and then Riku’s demonstrating basic forms to him (and the rest of the room, though they look away when he glances in any of their directions).

Close to the end of their half-hour, Karin has him stand straight and mime throwing knives, then corrects his form. (Keisuke asks if she can fix _his_ form and the look Karin gives him would curdle _water_.) Yakumo never once joins them; she keeps sketching, and Riku doesn’t catch her looking, but he thinks he feels her eyes on the back of his head a few times.

///

During quiet time, Riku again offers to look at Karin’s arm. Despite his promises to be careful and not make the injury any worse, she refuses to let him near it. After a solid couple minutes of stony silence, he gives up and turns his attention to the seal theory book. It makes a little more sense the second time: certain symbols correspond to certain elements, which can be combined to achieve certain effects. Then the book goes into an extended digression on the nature of chakra, which is _interesting_ but not exactly _useful_ , especially when Riku has a limited amount of time to read.

At the end of quiet time, doors once again start opening in their hall. Riku hears them, hears the footsteps, the crying children dragged down the hall. Karin isn’t tense this time, though, and their door doesn’t open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next update should be up either **Saturday, Jan. 19** , or **Sunday, Jan. 20** , depending on what else I have going on. If I wind up having to delay it, I'll post an ETA on my tumblr and my dreamwidth.
> 
> I've signed up for Get Your Words Out 2019, and right now I'm well above quota, but once I go back to work, we'll see how things shake out. I'm thinking about taking requests for shorter pieces (drabble length up to _the best people_ chapter length) in this universe (or AUs of it); would anyone be interested in that?


	4. Consequences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How to make friends and influence people: Sound Infiltration Version

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warnings** : casual physical violence, including corporal punishment for minor infractions and physical abuse in a teaching/training setting; specifically, this chapter includes flogging/belting for a minor infraction and adults encouraging children to cause physical harm (up to potentially very serious injury/maiming) in a teaching/training setting; mentions of blood and injuries. (As a counterpoint to chapter 2, we now get to see Riku being a good medic, though!)
> 
> Also, hey, quick reminder: while I use filler/anime-only characters, they haven't met Naruto at this point. They may have been otherwise influenced by ripple effects from various events/actions, but they won't have whatever character development came about in response to Naruto specifically.

The third day passes much like the second, with the sole exception that Riku tries to sit closer to Yakumo, and Karin, once she catches on, tries to stop him.

It’s not like they can talk during meals or training times anyway, but the poisonous looks Karin keeps giving Riku make him try harder. As far as he can tell, no one’s punished just for who they sit next to, so Karin’s concern seems unfounded.

He makes sure to keep close to Karin during training, though, so he can draw attention away from mistakes her arm forces her to make and, whenever possible, help. Far from being alone in this, Riku notices others doing the same: when Yukiko falters, Hiroshi’s hand slips, only for him to catch himself as soon as the guard turns in his direction; rather than let Takuma’s hits miss, Keisuke shifts his stance just enough to block them where they land, regardless of where they _ought_ to have been. They all slow down in the throwing range. It doesn’t get them to senbon and the library, but it means that no one’s out of breath, red in the face, or otherwise exhausted when they come back to the first training room during free time.

Riku dodges Karin’s attempts to drag him into jogging around the room and instead settles down next to Yakumo. The First and Second Hokages’ faces have been blocked out, while the Third’s face is a ghostly gap between them and the Fourth Hokage, who she’s working on now.

“Do you have a favorite?” he asks, quietly, one knee up with his elbow leaned onto it and his face pushed into his palm, the other leg tucked in and his other arm resting, relaxed and nonthreatening, on it. The others and the rest of the room are still there, of course, but it feels like there’s a bit of a wall between him and Yakumo and everything else.

Or a wall between them and the rest of the room, and then a fence between him and her, because she doesn’t acknowledge him for a long minute, then another.

He waits. He’s not a naturally patient person, and three different questions flit into and out of his mind while he bites his tongue. He watches her work instead of voicing them, tries to think of it like watching the ocean.

Watching the ocean, particularly at sunrise or sunset or when the weather is changing, is both relaxing and engaging. Granted, half the time he’d watch and imagine what other worlds must be like, but the point is, he didn’t feel the need to get up every other minute, or run around, or do _something_. (Tidus can be a menace, and Selphie isn’t much better.) If he was looking at the horizon, that could occupy his attention enough.

The Hokage Rock never held the same appeal, but watching Yakumo bring it into existence on a sheet of paper is interesting. She must have a lot of practice at it by now: she has calluses where she holds the pencil, and while she does pause to erase, she looks serenely focused, not frustrated.

“I like the Fourth,” she says, nearly a whisper, as she forms the line of his jaw, the planes of his face, his nose and mouth.

Riku hums, trying to communicate interest without pressure. The last thing he wants is to scare her away or shut her down. When she doesn’t say anything else, though, he ventures, “Can you tell me what you like about him? It’s okay if you don’t want to.”

For another several minutes, she just draws. The rest of the Fourth takes shape, and she draws in some of the cliff-face around him. It looks accurate to Riku’s eye, but he’s never spent long staring at the faces. Naruto could say for sure.

“They say he was kind,” she says finally. “That he loved everyone in the village, no matter what, so much he was willing to die for us all.” She then moves on to the Fifth, hesitating more over the lines than she had with the Fourth.

Well, the face of the Fifth is a lot newer; without knowing exactly when Yakumo was kidnapped, it’s possible the carving had only just started when she was there to see it.

Rather than detail the face, though, once she has a rough sketch of where it will be, she moves on to the rest of the cliff, putting in the upper edge and some of the jutting rocks and crags along its surface. She sketches out the zigzagging line of the stairs leading up to the First’s head, then the pockets of trees that make any structure of Konoha instantly recognizable.

When she sets her pencil down, the only parts left incomplete are the Third and Fifth Hokages’ faces. She neatly rolls the paper and pencil together, the end poking out so it won’t mess up anything. She ties it with a blue ribbon that looks familiar to Riku. Maybe Sakura had one like it, back when her hair was longer?

Then Yakumo looks at him. Her normally blank, calm face shows an expression: her brows are furrowed, and while she isn’t quite frowning yet, it looks like she will at any moment.

“Why do you care who my favorite Hokage is?”

Riku shrugs. His leg twinges, telling him he should have shifted position at some point; he’ll have a red mark on his cheek from his palm, too, and no doubt he’ll hear about this from Karin.

“I figured you were drawing it for a reason.”

She tilts her head to the side, gaze darting from his eyes to the rest of his face down to how he’s sitting, turned toward her and away from everyone else.

“If you could draw something,” she asks, “what would it be?”

People aren’t subtle about weighty questions. For someone who has spent the last few days paying him little attention, she’s sure giving it to him now.

He shouldn’t give too many details about where he grew up—just in case the guard who doesn’t seem to notice what any of them are doing is listening in on this one quiet conversation—but then, he doesn’t need to, does he?

“There was this tree I used to hang out at with my friends,” he says. “It was all bent over sideways,” he draws the shape of it in the air with his hands, “so one of them would lay all over it, and the other one would sit on it. I’d get stuck with the part that curved up,” and he sketches this out, too, “or standing and leaning against it. We all fit on it better when we were younger.”

They were smaller, then, and everything in the world—the world itself—seemed bigger.

Yakumo blinks at him. “You would draw the tree?”

Shaking his head, he says, “No, not _just_ the tree. All of it. The tree, them on it, the sunset… Every time I see them, we spend time there. It’s our place. If I could draw anything to take with me wherever I went, it’d be that.”

“Would you change anything about it? If you could?”

He grins. “What, like make the tree bigger?” She doesn’t smile back, so she’s serious, not joking. Okay. He shakes his head. “Nah. I like it the way it is. If I changed it, it wouldn’t be ours anymore, you know?”

“It would be just yours.”

He nods. “Right, exactly. I don’t want it to just be mine. If I can’t share it with my friends, what’s the point? It’s just a place. It doesn’t really matter. The people are what matter.”

Yakumo looks troubled by that and doesn’t say anything in response. She instead looks at her hands, holding the paper in her lap. Rather than bother her anymore, Riku leaves her alone and gets up, stretching out his protesting limbs.

Hiroshi and Takuma are practicing suicides, while Keisuke and Yukiko practice their punches and blocks. Emi is taking her usual nap while Karin jogs laps around the room. She heads over and joins Riku when he walks over to Keisuke and Yukiko.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong with our footwork?” Yukiko asks, staring fixedly at Riku and not acknowledging Karin at all.

“Sure, show me.”

They do, and he offers corrections and suggestions. Yukiko got some solid training, but Keisuke is all over the place, which in turn throws Yukiko off; even decently-trained genin struggle to adapt to a poorly-trained opponent.

In a real fight, all those openings and mistakes would make her job easier. Trying to match him, though, and do it in sync with a line of people, causes problems.

They run through a few rounds, taking turns punching and blocking so they can get the hang of both. Hiroshi and Takuma join shortly, and Riku keeps an eye on their form but doesn’t spot any glaring mistakes. They could all be quicker, smoother, and more tuned-in to the rest of their rows, but that will come with time.

Part of Riku hopes he isn’t here long enough to see it; the rest of him is worried about what comes next. Sound can’t be content with just this one strike, just this one block. They’ll move on, and without Riku, how will the rest do with the new moves?

(This is why Tsunade didn’t give him the files for the Konoha genin. Being around Yakumo is bad enough, and he doesn’t have any obligation to any of the others, and yet. How Tsunade knew he’d react like this, he isn’t sure, because she’s barely spoken to him since he debriefed after being kidnapped, but she _must_ have known.)

With the others all situated, Riku runs some suicides of his own; he’s cut off on the third line by the guards summoning them for dinner. After, during quiet time, Karin asks him if he had a nice talk with Yakumo. Her lip curls as she says it, and when he tells her they just talked about Yakumo’s sketch, she rolls her eyes, but she leaves him alone for the rest of the night.

Once again, their door doesn’t open, and Riku’s selfish enough to feel relieved.

///

Riku finds out on the fourth morning what happens if you spill a tray: immediate public flogging.

He doesn’t serve, but Karin does—he almost gets up with her, except she hurriedly jerks her hands down when he starts to rise—and Riku keeps an eye on her even after he gets his own breakfast tray and starts eating. He sees Emi bump into her, sees Karin catch her balance but fumble the tray, sees Emi flee back into the kitchen before the clatter alerts the guards.

Half the table, it sounds like, sucks in air at that. Takuma and Keisuke quickly turn back to their trays, already facing away from Karin; Yakumo pays no attention to the commotion; Yukiko leans forward, eyes fixed on Karin.

The guards converge on her, forcing her to kneel and yanking her shirt up. One pulls off her belt.

Riku only knows about this injury pattern because Ms. Honda sat all her students—Anzu, Mariko, Riku, and Tsuru—down and went over it with them. “If you see anything like this,” she told them, showing pictures of the injuries at each stage of the healing process, “report it immediately.” She’d then drilled them on the forms, 3045 for civilians, 3046 for Academy students, 3075 for genin or above.

(The forms don’t _just_ cover physical abuse, and there’s more to physical abuse than belting, which Ms. Honda went over with each of them in excruciating detail, giving them potential scenarios and then making them justify how they would fill out the forms. By the end of that week, Tsuru had started semi-seriously talking about getting a puppy or a kitten or something else small and cute to remind herself that the world wasn’t entirely terrible. If Riku thought Naruto’s apartment was big enough, he would’ve probably gotten one. As it is, he had to content himself with Naruto’s plants.)

With a sore back added to a broken arm, Karin’s performance during physical training is pitiable, and she flinches when they get to the restraints. The guards don’t seem to try to hurt her, but they don’t avoid contact with her back, either. Riku does his best but trying to keep away from her back eats up time they don’t have, and Karin is sent to the door first.

She glares at Riku all through the second round, when he only exerts a token effort to get free (shaking his head when Takuma reaches for him) and winds up with her at the door. They’re joined by Hiroshi, but the others manage to get themselves and one another free.

It turns out that beating the restraints earns you target practice; flunking the restraints _makes_ you target practice.

They’re taken to a different throwing range, this one lacking in targets, where the actual Sound genin are all lined up along one wall. Riku and the others from his hall aren’t the only ones brought in: there are five already there when they come in, and another seven join minutes later.

All the recruits are given white robes to put on over their gray outfits. The guards then have them line up perpendicular to the line of Sound genin. There are painted lines to indicate where each recruit’s lane is, as well as the lines that Riku associates with suicides.

The recruits are told to run as quickly as possible and avoid being hit. Riku doesn’t understand until the guard calls “Recruits, begin!” and then turns to the Sound genin and begins distributing throwing knives.

There are no _stationary_ targets in the room.

Riku runs, gets to the first line, runs back to the wall. By the time he’s heading for the second line, the genin start throwing. He hears some knives miss, hitting the far wall or clattering to the floor. He hears some knives connect, recruits cursing or crying out.

The knives are blunted, but even a blunt knife can maim or kill, if thrown with sufficient force or aim (or luck). A blunt knife can still blind someone if it hits their eyes; can result in permanent hearing loss if it connects with an ear, or disability if it hits a wrist or ankle or spine…

By the time he smacks the fourth line, the halfway point of the room, and heads back, he’s started to smell the blood. Not enough to choke, yet, but still metallic and cloying. Blood, he thinks with disgust, shows up _excellently_ on white clothing.

Some knives are clearly aimed at him, but if there’s one thing Riku can do after years of running obstacle courses on the Islands and then months of Gai’s training, it’s _run_. Most of the knives slice through the air behind him, while a couple (clearly overcompensating) miss him from the front. He hits the far wall without being hit, and makes it back, dodging around a couple of well-aimed throws and picking one knife up off the floor.

He can’t split his attention while he’s running—too risky, too likely to end in a twisted ankle—but he slows down as he approaches the starting wall. One of the genin is clearly watching Riku. As Riku restarts, the genin takes aim.

Riku compensates for the other runners and throws first.

The genin flinches; his hands come up to protect his face. Riku gets back to the starting wall and a guard is there, in his lane, and tells him, “Stop.”

Riku stops. The action in the room grinds to a slow halt as well, heads swiveling to look at Riku.

The guard, showing no sign of noticing anyone else, says, “You’re now in this lane,” and points to Hiroshi’s lane.

Riku goes. There isn’t enough space for two people to pass each other, and Hiroshi’s already nicked in his thigh (not his femoral, or else he’d have bled out by the time Riku notices) and his shoulder, with a graze just under his ribs. Riku notes the injuries and figures the plan here is a bottleneck: every time one of them needs to pass the other, they’ll have to slow down, giving the genin an easier shot at hitting either of them.

But Riku’s experience is _obstacle courses_ and _Gai_ _’s training_. He clears the first and second lines before Hiroshi returns from the seventh, and when Hiroshi is headed straight for him, Riku doesn’t slow down.

Hiroshi does, which makes it easier for Riku to leap over him.

It’s such a basic skill that Riku learned it from a _child_ in his _first month in Konoha_ , and yet, out of the corner of his eye, Riku sees gobsmacked expressions on several Sound genin. Maybe they just don’t expect the recruits to try anything like that?

Whatever; the guards don’t tell Riku not to, so he keeps it up. The second time, Hiroshi expects the move and flinches; the third time, he doesn’t slow down, but does duck a bit, which Riku appreciates. (He also appreciates that _Hiroshi_ doesn’t try jumping; with that thigh injury, even a basic maneuver could go awry.)

The Sound genin trade knives for shuriken, which Riku has less experience with. Shuriken clip him a couple times (the first genin to connect with him gives a little cheer, while the others grumble at her) and he has to dodge more creatively, ducking down himself, stopping abruptly, or spinning out of the way.

All of this would be easier if he had chakra, of course; a little body flicker and he wouldn’t be hit at all. But the seals at his wrist seem to pulse hungrily when he so much as thinks about using chakra.

The Sound genin aren’t any better with senbon than the recruits are, but there are enough moving bodies that luck makes up for a complete lack of skill. Only after all the recruits make a run without any accidental hits from the genin do the guards stop the whole practice.

The recruits line up opposite the Sound genin and the two lines survey one another. Of all the recruits, Riku has the least injuries; a pair of girls he doesn’t recognize at all are the next least injured. Hiroshi is mostly okay, apart from his thigh, which is worryingly bloody.

Karin’s whole left side has scattered puncture wounds, grazes, and even a senbon still embedded in her hip.

The guards dismiss the genin and pull Riku and the pair of girls out of the line. After some silent consideration, they also select Hiroshi, Karin, and another boy with blood-matted hair and a shuriken stuck in his bicep.

One guard walks the group of six down the hall. Riku is almost sure he’s never been this way before, but all the halls look the same, and he’s worried about Hiroshi, Karin, and the other boy; even though he’s mostly uninjured, he slows down so he’s at the back of the group, just in case one of the others stumbles and needs a hand before the guards decide to beat anyone else.

The smells of _hospital_ register before anything else: Riku straightens, glancing around. Without his notice, the hall has become better-lit, overhead fluorescents replacing the torch aesthetic. The floor is tile, not stone. Riku can dimly hear medical machinery behind some of the doors they pass: those beeps are from heart-rate monitors, and he thinks he catches a ventilator or two.

They’re taken to a small clinic room with four beds and what looks like basic medical supplies. The guard, as usual, takes up position by the door; the two girls claim beds, as does the boy with a head wound, while Hiroshi and Karin head over to the supplies.

Riku gets there first and glares at them. “Go sit down,” he says, mostly to Hiroshi.

“On what bed?” Karin asks, head tipping in the direction of the girls, who are now giggling about…something.

“I said sit down, not fall asleep,” he says, instead of what he thinks, which is _on top of those two, if they won_ _’t move_. Ms. Honda—really, any medic-nin—would have some strong opinions about people with low-priority injuries like the scratches the girls have taking beds while people with higher-priority wounds like Hiroshi or Karin are waiting, but Riku can wait to yell at the girls until after he’s dealt with, first, the head wound, and then Hiroshi’s thigh.

First things first: Riku washes his hands, discards the white robe, and does a quick check of his own wounds, mostly to be sure he’s not about to bleed on a patient. What cuts he has are all clotting, though. Not ideal, but according to Ms. Honda, no conditions are ideal when ninja are involved. He pulls on a pair of gloves, then looks at what’s available.

Because of the senbon in Karin’s hip, Riku grabs a pair of pliers as well as a roll of bandages, antiseptic, and some rags, plus a bucket that he fills with water.

His first stop is Head-wound Boy, who reluctantly sits up and looks like he wants to vomit. From pain, not a concussion, Riku thinks after checking his pupils; washing the blood off with the rags reveals a long, shallow cut from one temple and past the ear, which thankfully looks like it escaped harm. Riku judges that it’s shallow enough to not need stitches and wraps a bandage around the kid’s head and tells him to lay down.

A medical scan could assure him that there’s no concussion, no other serious injuries, but Riku has to work off visuals and self-reporting. The shuriken in the kid’s arm, he removes (the kid cries out, but doesn’t hit him, so that’s a plus), and _that_ _’s_ deep enough to need stitches.

Riku goes back to the supplies, gets a new set of gloves, and finds a needle and thread. He isn’t the _best_ at this, but he’s at least better than Mariko, who always manages to not only use three times as much thread as anyone else, but also tends to make a snarled mess that someone else needs to fix. (Riku was, maybe, a little insufferable the week that they discovered that Tsuru has the neatest stitches, but Riku isn’t awful and Mariko is. He _might_ have then gotten Mariko an embroidery kit; he’s willing to admit that he earned duty as an ER errand-boy for a week for that.

He _didn_ _’t_ deserve the look of pure disappointment he got from Anzu, and even Tsuru’s surreptitious high-five didn’t make up for it.)

Now, Riku cleans and disinfects the wound, and keeps his stitches as neat and precise as he can manage. The kid isn’t grateful, just sinks into the hospital bed and closes his eyes once Riku’s done.

Next up is Hiroshi’s thigh wound. Riku, after examining where it is, finds a pair of scissors with the supplies. They’re almost too dull for what he needs, but he manages to cut Hiroshi’s pants off just above the wound, pulling the extra material free. Once again, he swaps gloves, then cleans and disinfects the area. The wound is deeper than he thought, though there’s too little blood for it to have hit the femoral artery, so Hiroshi got lucky. It’s small enough that, rather than stitches, Riku finds a butterfly bandage and uses that to seal it closed. As a precaution, he wraps another bandage on top, and tells Hiroshi to be careful with the leg.

“Unless you don’t mind losing it,” he adds, and watches all the color drain out of the boy’s face.

“I’ll be careful!”

“Good.”

Karin’s a lot easier to help, although she still doesn’t let him touch her arm. She does let him pry out the senbon and bandage her hip, then treat the rest of her new wounds.

Hesitantly, Riku asks, “Can I see your back?”

She eyes him for a long moment, one eyebrow ticking up in thought (or irritation?) before she sighs and nods. “Fine.”

She kicks Hiroshi until he slides onto the floor, careful not to jostle his leg, and then Karin stretches herself out on the bed, face-down. Riku lifts her shirt, taking care not to touch the skin of her back.

There are five large welts with no identifiable pattern. He frowns, fixing this in his memory. He can’t imagine why Sound would let the guards hurt their recruits like this; there’s no way he’ll ever willingly join a village that does _this_ to kids.

He can’t do much, but he does what he can, cleaning the whole area and then spreading an antibiotic cream over it, just in case. With welts that big, infection would be nasty to deal with, and Riku has no faith that anyone else in this prison will help Karin if her back gets infected.

“Alright, those should go down in a day or so,” he tells her. “Let me know if they get any worse, okay?”

“Sure.” She sits up; her brows furrow as she looks at him, but she isn’t frowning or scowling or glaring, for once. “So, Emi was right? You are a medic-nin?”

Riku shrugs, tapping Hiroshi on the shoulder and motioning him to get back on the bed. The floor can’t be comfortable, and anyway, Riku isn’t sure it’s safe. (It looks clean, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily _disinfected_.)

“I have some training,” he says. “Hold that thought.”

And then, patients treated, he heads over to the giggling girls.

They stop giggling when he stands over them.

“Where are you hurt?” he asks, in his best imitation of Tsunade. He even plants his hands on his hips, feet lined up with his shoulders; one of the girls is _maybe_ the same age as him, the other is obviously younger, and they’re laying down on beds while he towers over them.

They both have brown hair, one a darker shade with two pigtails, the other almost blonde in a single, frizzy ponytail. The light-haired girl is easily a head taller than the other one, though they both have slim runners’ builds and only a few more scratches and other wounds than Riku.

The nearer one, with the darker hair, says, “Oh, we’re not hurt.” And she shares a raised-eyebrow look with her partner, before the two start giggling again.

“Then why are you laying down?”

The both blink at him and share another one of those looks. This time, the light-haired girl answers. “We won. This is our reward. You did too, you know.”

Riku tries to channel every adult who’s ever had to deal with an obnoxious, disappointing child in his presence. (Primarily that winds up being his mom, Iruka, and Ms. Honda. Gai, of course, has had to deal with _him_ , but Riku can’t hope to channel that man’s pure enthusiasm and goodwill; Gai could make these girls feel terrible without saying anything remotely scolding, but Riku lacks that ability.)

“We’re in a clinic,” he tells them. “We came in with injured comrades. We didn’t _win_ , we’re here to _help our teammates_. If you can’t do that, the least you can do is not take up space.”

The light-haired girl raises both eyebrows and sends the other girl what is clearly a _get a load of THIS guy_ look. Riku has no patience for it.

The beds are bolted to the floor, which makes sense to Riku; the mattresses are very much not, because you have to replace and clean those. Even with the darker-haired girl’s entire weight on it, it takes Riku almost no effort to yank the mattress off the bed.

The girl squawks, but doesn’t catch herself, tumbling to the floor in a tangle of limbs. Her friend starts yelling, but Riku ignores them both, flipping the mattress over and replacing it on the bed.

“Hey, Karin,” he says over his shoulder. “C’mere.”

Her expression is sharp and amused as she, without further prompting, sprawls out on the bed.

Riku turns to the dark-haired girl and offers her a hand up.

She stares at him. “You just—you jerk! You can’t do that!”

They all look at the guard, who pays none of them any attention at all.

“Do you have any medical training?” he asks her. At her bemused head-shake, he turns to her partner. “What about you?” He checks with Karin, Hiroshi, and even looks at the other boy, who appears to be sleeping now. (Possibly concerning, but his chest rises and falls, and Riku doesn’t particularly have the tools or abilities he would need to do anything more about that.) “Well, I do. While we’re in the clinic, I’m in charge, and that means that you act like the genin you are. Or do you think your jounin-commander would be happy, seeing you taking up bed-space when your teammates are injured and have to share?”

The girls both look ashamed, but Karin provides some unexpected push-back.

“We’re not genin, though,” she says. “Not anymore.”

He raises his eyebrows at her. “What, your village revoked your rank?”

“My ‘village,’” and she uses air-quotes, “doesn’t give a shit about me. That’s why I’m _here_. That’s why we’re _all_ here.”

“No one’s coming to rescue us,” Hiroshi adds. “They don’t know we’re here, and they don’t care.”

Riku rolls his eyes. “Okay, so? I’m not talking about that. Your village made you a genin and they never took it back, right? So what gives Sound the right to take it away?” He pauses, and even the girls look intrigued. “They _can_ _’t_. They can say we’re not Sound genin, but they can’t say we aren’t genin _period_ , right?” Karin doesn’t nod, but she does seem to consider his words; the others are nodding. “It’s time to act like it.”

“How?” the light-haired girl asks. Her partner has picked herself up by now and settled next to her on the bed.

“Genin have teammates,” he tells them. He shouldn’t have to, but he does. “They keep us with people from our halls, mostly, don’t they? That’s your squad. You should be looking after them, helping them.”

There’s a pause, and then Hiroshi snaps his fingers. “That’s what you were doing! When you showed me how to do push-ups and everything else.”

The girls straighten at that. “I _always_ mess up push-ups,” the dark-haired one says. “I swear, I have a boot-shaped bruise on my back. Look,” and she starts to pull her shirt up before her partner, groaning, stops her.

For a second time, Riku demonstrates proper push-up technique, and then punching and blocking, and then Hiroshi wants to know how he got so fast at running.

“Practice,” the light-haired girl answers for him. “It’s obvious. Were you trained as a courier before you were a medic?”

She refuses to believe his denial and he doesn’t want to go into detail to prove it, so he changes the subject to seal theory, which gets groans from everyone awake in the room.

“Okay, okay, if you got medical training you probably _haven_ _’t_ had advanced ninjutsu training, right?” (Hiroshi and the other girl both loudly declare that that would be _way too much, there_ _’s no way_ before Riku can say no for himself.) “So, the thing to understand about seal theory is that it’s still using elemental chakra, it’s just kind of…banking it for later. And because you’re banking it, you can combine different kinds of chakra in ways that you _couldn_ _’t_ in ninjutsu. You with me?”

Riku is with her. He’s pretty sure she’s just repeating what the book said, but because he listens better than he reads, it makes about three hundred percent more sense.

“There’s ways to write seals that make the seal more powerful—like, some symbols go better with certain chakra, right? But technically, if you’ve got enough chakra to throw at it, you could draw a bunch of squiggly lines and get a seal to blow up. That’s why exploding tags are so cheap. If you want anything fancy, though, like a delayed blast, you need to actually know some symbols.”

The dark-haired girl giggles. “You haven’t used that before, have you, Sen?”

Sen shakes her head. “There are easier ways to make a bomb. I’m just trying to explain that memorizing a bunch of symbols isn’t the best way to learn sealing.”

“I didn’t know you knew that much about it!”

Either they’re from the same village, which seems like a huge risk to Sound, or they’ve spent a lot of time together since being “recruited.” Whatever the case may be, Sen just shrugs and says, “It didn’t come up.”

“Wait.” Everyone looks at him. “You _need_ chakra to use seals?”

Sighs all around.

“And that’s why no one’s escaped.” Sen glances quickly at the guard, but there’s no reproach from that direction. “You can know all the theory in the world, but without chakra, it’s useless.”

“They know it, too,” the other girl says. “They’re even teaching us how to escape! It’s like it’s all one big joke to them.”

There’s really nothing to say in response to that, and their time is up shortly after that anyway. The guard tells them to leave the sleeping boy in the clinic, which Riku almost protests, but Karin digs her nails into him under the cover of just grabbing his hand.

///

All the recruits from the clinic stay seated during dinner, so Riku supposes training injuries aren’t considered punishment. (Or the injuries themselves are punishment enough, anyway.) Hiroshi and Keisuke both sit between Karin and Yukiko, while Takuma takes the seat between Riku and Emi. Riku wonders if they planned that, or if they’re just operating based on their own intuition. In any case, none of the people from their hall are stuck serving dinner, and there are no opportunities for Emi and Karin to interact at all.

Once they’re safely in their room for “quiet time,” Riku turns on Karin. “Why did Emi set you up?”

She waves for him to sit down, and he does, cross-legged on his bed across from hers. Absently, he notes how gingerly she sits thanks to her hip and back.

“I think she’s a plant,” Karin says grimly, “and I think she’s interested in _you_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With work starting up again, I'm going to put up chapter 5 on either **Saturday, February 9th** or **Sunday, February 10th**. That gives me an extra week to finish editing and polishing it, and hopefully some additional time to work on the next story. 
> 
> Just as a heads-up, because this is the halfway point, after this story is all posted, I'll hold off on posting the next one until I have it all written out. So far, being able to go back and edit knowing how the story ends has worked out very nicely, and I think I'll keep that up at least for these shorter fics. (When we get to the KH1 and Shippuden plotlines, uh, _we'll see_.)


	5. Dependencies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maybe coming to Sound was a mistake. There's no sign of Sakura or Sasuke and Riku's starting to get _attached_ to his fellow recruits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warnings** : major character injury; mentions of casual physical violence, blood, and injuries. You can pretty much assume that everything that came before is still happening, but now it's just background radiation.

Karin looks delicate, holding herself carefully to avoid aggravating her injuries, webs of old scars on her ankles and wrists, calves and forearms. Her expression is anything but as she accuses Emi of being a plant.

Both eyebrows raised, Riku plants his elbows on his knees and leans forward. “What makes you say that?”

Karin holds up three fingers. “One: she knew you were a medic-nin. Unless you told her? Or she’s from the same village as you?” Riku shakes his head, and Karin sighs. “Didn’t think so. The only way she would know that, then, is if she heard it from someone higher-up in Sound, and _they_ don’t tell _us_ anything.”

That was a couple days ago, and this is the first time Karin’s sharing her suspicions? Either she felt she needed more proof, or she wasn’t sure of _Riku_ yet.

He doesn’t say any of that, just nods and says, “Fair enough. What’s two?”

“She’s trying to get rid of me.” Karin holds up her splinted arm. “They’ll put up with some injuries, but if you get too hurt, you get kicked out.”

Riku doesn’t want to know what that involves. (The kid with the head wound—Riku hasn’t seen him since, has he? Of course, Riku doesn’t pay attention to most of the strangers… He could probably sneak some glances around at mealtimes, see if he can spot the boy.) “That’s two. What about three?”

“She’s always roommates with whoever’s doing the best.” Karin leans back, shrugging, even though it must hurt. Her face barely twitches. Her pain tolerance must be _amazing_. “First it was Yukiko, then Hiroshi. Now she’s with Yakumo. Yakumo is quiet, but she never gets in trouble. Before you came along, we thought she was going to head to the next hall.”

“Next hall?”

“Think of it like…passing a test. If you do well enough, they’ll even make you a Sound genin.” She rocks forward, all the way onto her knees, face way too close to his. “And you shouldn’t have said _any_ of that earlier, by the way. That was stupid.”

“I said what I needed to.” Pause. “Are they going to hurt you again because of it?”

She blinks. This close, he can smell soap from her shower, the antibiotic he put on her back, the lingering smell of blood. Her eyelashes are as red as her hair. Her eyes are wide, mouth slack with shock.

“Uh. No, I don’t think so.”

“Good.” He smiles at her and counts it a personal victory when she smiles back. “So, you think Emi’s trying to replace you?”

A nod, and then Karin makes a face, lips pursing and eyebrows furrowing. “It might be better for you if she does. Unless you want to stay a recruit forever.” She tucks her chin and looks up at him through eyelashes, a move that Ino practiced with him extensively. “What _do_ you want, anyway? Just to find those friends of yours?”

With a sigh, Riku sinks backward onto the futon, curling up onto his side so he can still look at her. “They’re not exactly friends.” Sakura, he’d still count; Sasuke, not so much. “Right now, I want to figure out this stupid seal theory.”

“And after that?”

On the one hand, she’s been here longer than he has; if there’s any clues on how to escape, she might know some. On the other hand, if Sound even suspects that Riku’s here as an agent, he’s dead.

Tsunade was honest about the risks. If it had been for anyone but Sakura and Sasuke—anyone but his uncle and Naruto’s team—if Mariko hadn’t been the original target—he would have turned it down.

“I don’t know,” he tells her, and turns away, pulling out the book and finding the same section that Sen explained. With more context, the words make a lot more sense: symbols and other features, like straight versus curved lines, are associated with certain kinds of chakra, and using them together makes the seal more powerful. Using the wrong kind of chakra with the wrong line or marking can make the whole thing useless…or explode in your face. Seal theory masters study the connections between marks, chakra, and results; without that level of familiarity, any stray mark could have drastically unexpected effects.

Riku examines the seals on his wrists. They look identical. It’s too much to hope that there might be a mistake in one; Riku’s far, far from the first kidnapped recruit.

Then again, according to the book and Sen, a mistake would probably result in him blowing up. Maybe for the best that there aren’t any.

The book is just an introduction, not a sealing dictionary, so while it includes some examples of various symbols (some of them are kanji, but a lot are decidedly _not_ ), Riku can’t find anything similar to what’s on him.

He’s in the middle of double-checking when quiet time ends and doors begin opening. Riku isn’t taken away. Karin is.

He waits, and wonders. Wonders if Kabuto does all the interrogations, or if Orochimaru has a whole group of people who run them. Wonders what they’re asking her. Wonders what she’s saying.

Is she telling them that he asked about Sakura and Sasuke? What he said earlier today? (Is that why they _took_ her? But no, wouldn’t they take _him_ then? Or maybe they’re waiting to take him tomorrow, after getting more information from Karin first? If they’re interrogating her about things like that, they must not have video surveillance, or they wouldn’t even bother.)

He tries to keep reading, but his attention skitters off the page and down the hall. After the wave of opening doors, cries, shouts, sniffles, and whimpers die down, silence smothers the room. Turns it claustrophobic. If Riku could leave, he would; as it is, he stops rereading to get up and pace, making tight circuits of the room without stepping on Karin’s futon. Measured footsteps, growing louder, freeze him.

The door opens. It isn’t Karin, isn’t even Karin and a guard. Instead, it’s a young man with a distinctive orange haircut and an outfit that would set him apart from the recruits and genin alike.

Riku doesn’t know who he is, but the guy filling the doorway was eating at Orochimaru’s table two nights ago.

He steps into the room and Riku jerks back, crouching to grab his book and then darting back up. It isn’t much, but it is heavy.

The young man looks at the book in his hand, then Riku’s face. “Oh? Are you planning on using that?”

What stops Riku isn’t that the idea is stupid, or even that the young man is built like a wrestler and clearly on-guard against that specific attack. What stops him is the thought that, if he hits the guy but _doesn_ _’t_ take him down, Karin will be punished for his actions, and they don’t have any reason to take it easy on her. Between the injuries she got today and the broken arm, anything else they do to her could be critical.

Could be fatal.

So he drops the book and puts his hands up. A mistake—the guy moves more quickly than Riku expects, in the doorway one second and looming over Riku the next, one huge hand wrapped around Riku’s right wrist just below the seal. He holds Riku up with that grip so that Riku’s feet dangle over the ground, unable to find purchase.

Riku could grab the guy’s arm in turn, could use that as leverage to try to kick him in the face or at least knee him in the gut. If he could use chakra, he could do even more.

But…Karin…

He doesn’t attack.

The guy eyes him, or more specifically, eyes the seal on his wrist. “Lord Orochimaru’s handiwork… What you have is a pale imitation of ours. A lock, instead of a key.”

The guy doesn’t explain what that means, and before Riku can ask, he starts squeezing. He doesn’t mess around or draw it out: he clenches his fist around Riku’s forearm until Riku flinches and then screams, until the _crack_ he used to hear in his nightmares sounds throughout the room.

The man drops Riku, who crumples onto his knees, folding into himself.

“Pathetic,” the man says. “A real ninja, even a genin, should have more control of himself.” He scoffs, then reaches into something—a pouch?

A bundle drops down next to Riku, and the man, with one last sneer, leaves the room.

The bundle is just a basic splint and bandages, but however disappointing a ninja Riku may be, he’s a well-trained medical student.

He isn’t bleeding externally, although his arm is already starting to bruise horribly. He splints it with his left hand, flinching and having to stop several times to breathe through the pain. It might just be a partial fracture, not cracked all the way through the bone. It doesn’t seem displaced, either, which is good—he doesn’t really have the resources to deal with that.

By the time the door opens and Karin stumbles in, Riku’s done the best he can. He’s lying on his back, eyes closed, arm across his chest where hopefully he won’t roll onto it and hurt it any worse.

He hears her kneel next to his bed, hears the slide of cloth as she—what, leans over him? Reaches for him? She doesn’t say anything, though, just sighs and goes back to her bed.

///

With Riku and Karin both in splints, he figures they’re guaranteed to be target practice again. That doesn’t happen, though. Instead, Hiroshi, Keisuke, Takuma, and even Yukiko make it their personal mission to keep Riku and Karin from failing too badly.

Riku can do one-handed push-ups, and when it comes time for blocking, Hiroshi leads the row in using their left arms. (Karin is, thankfully, facing Riku, so he just has to worry about her jostling her own broken arm, not taking hits to it as well.) The same happens when it’s their turn to punch. Since most of the row is equally terrible with their off-hands (the sole exception, left-handed Takuma, has to visibly slow down to match everyone else), they turn in a more unified performance, only having to run suicides a couple of times.

In the escape room, the uninjured recruits make quick work of everyone’s restraints. With the group working as a whole, no one is sent to the door. They all go to the throwing range, where they all throw first knives, then shuriken, then senbon.

Riku’s aim is marginal at best with his left hand, but Karin got him closest to the wall, and _her_ aim is better today. When they’re handed the senbon, Karin clears her throat and makes a show of slowly moving first her hands, then her arms, then the rest of her body into position.

They aren’t allowed to _talk_ , but everyone watches her. The guards send them to run suicides for it, since they’re not in sync, but Karin manages to hit the target long enough for Riku to make it back to his spot and mimic her.

His aim _sucks_ , but he gets one in ten needles in the target. (If his target had to walk anywhere, it’d be in trouble, but Riku doesn’t get anywhere close to major organs or arteries. The needles stick, though, and that counts for something.) Emi does almost as well as Karin; Yukiko and Keisuke hit the target about half the time, with everyone else somewhere in between them and Riku.

They get to go back to the library, and it’s only when Riku sees the guard checking scrolls from the others that he remembers Karin’s warning to bring the book back.

The book he left in their room.

Something knocks into his shoulder. He blinks, turns; Karin raises her eyebrows, the seal theory book held up, her own scroll in her other hand.

Once they’re through the door, she says, “Try not to forget again, Riku,” and retreats to the shelves, apparently intent on replacing the scroll with a new one.

There’s still a lot more for him to read in the Beginner’s Introduction to Sealing, so he plans to take that with him and uses the opportunity to find and read the two scrolls he found the first time. One is missing, but the other is right where he last saw it, and details the Enclosing Jutsu, the most basic and widespread form of sealing.

Without chakra, Riku can’t _use_ it, but he reads through it enough that he could probably replicate it. He wouldn’t try it on anything delicate or valuable to begin with, of course, but he could seal, say, a knife into a scroll or a piece of paper.

Better yet, a set of _lock-picks_ on a seal somewhere he can hide and keep safe, just in case he gets kidnapped for real and they take his shoes like Sound did. His shoes have an excellent set of lock-picks (also a back-up scalpel that’s more an emergency weapon than an emergency medical tool), but those aren’t doing him any good now, are they?

Emi comes over to him a few times, asking him if this or that medical jutsu scroll is any good. He answers her, trying not to think _are you a Sound plant_ because he _knows_ it’ll color his expression.

The others check in with him, mostly to see if he’s okay, but they don’t linger. Karin, just like last time, leaves him to fend for himself. Takuma once again sleeps through most of their half-hour.

///

At dinner, Riku spots the guy who broke his arm. There are three others in the same outfit near him. Orochimaru isn’t present, but Kabuto is; Kabuto catches Riku looking and, with a pleasant smile Riku doesn’t trust at all, raises one eyebrow.

Riku ducks his head and returns to his food.

///

During quiet time, Karin settles onto her futon and starts reading her scroll, giving every indication that she intends to spend the half-hour that way. Riku clears his throat.

“Are they going to drag me out tonight?” he asks.

She cuts her eyes at him. “How should I know?”

“Experience?” At her shrug, he sighs and changes tack. “Any idea what I could say so they _don_ _’t_ hurt you?”

At that, she sits up and turns to face him. “Why do you even care?”

“You’re my teammate,” he tells her, not sure how she managed to miss this; he hasn’t tried to hide that he feels this way.

“That’s so… You can’t help yourself, can you?” She groans and buries her face in her hands, dropping her scroll in the process.

Riku waits for her to collect herself before asking, “What?”

“You! With your whole—teammates, honestly. That isn’t how ninja work. Where the hell are you even _from_?” He opens his mouth to answer, but she cuts him off. “No, don’t say it. I know. We all know. That’s why you were interested in Yakumo, isn’t it?”

Thrown by the non-sequitur, Riku only gets out a “Huh?”

Karin stares at him. “You didn’t know?” At his head-shake, she says, “Yakumo is from Konoha. I assumed you knew. That’s why I told you to stay away.” She follows this up by a tidal wave of words. “They don’t like it when you recognize people from your village, and they don’t like you spending time with those people. It’s an easy way to get hurt. You should stay away from her, you don’t want them to think you’re planning something.”

He blinks, certain that’s more than she’s ever told him in one sitting. She glares back.

“I have no idea who Yakumo is,” he says. “I never saw her before coming here.”

“Oh.”

He hesitates, then sighs. Part of him still doesn’t trust Karin—probably won’t trust anyone he meets in this place, really. That doesn’t have to be the part he listens to, though.

“Did you tell them I asked about Sakura and Sasuke?” He keeps his voice down, low enough that it won’t carry past the door.

Karin’s eyes are narrow and menacing, the room dim enough that their color could be mistaken for the red of dried blood. Her whole body is turned toward him, the bandages a shock of white against the more muted grey of her shirt. Still laying down, only now propped up on her good elbow.

“Did you just accuse me of _snitching_?” She sounds like she’s sneering, and what Riku can make out of her face confirms it.

“No!” Beat. He eyes the book in his hands, hair falling so he can’t make her out even in his peripheral. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Just let me know so when they come for my other arm, it isn’t a surprise.”

That earns a snort of laughter from her, and he risks a look out of the corner of his eye. She isn’t pretending, isn’t faking it; by the time he looks, the laugh is over, but her mouth is still pulled in what he’s sure is a smile.

“Read your book,” she tells him. “They’re not coming for your other arm tonight.” Beat. “Probably.”

“Reassuring.” Still, he gives her a flippant salute—nothing she’d recognize, since all the ninja Riku knows bow, but he only realizes that after he’s done it—and turns his attention back to his book.

When he gets to the section on the theory behind Enclosing Jutsu, he finds, carefully tucked between the pages, a scrap of paper, thin enough to be imperceptible before now. Tugging it free, he notes: not paper, parchment. Soft to his fingertips, with ripped edges but clear enough writing.

Riku barely notices the kanji the directions are written in, but he recognizes the picture in the diagram. In tiny, well-illustrated detail is a replication of the seal on his wrists, with each part labeled and described down to how much and what type of chakra went into it.

This is a map to the seals keeping his chakra from him, and if Riku _had_ chakra, he could use it to open the seals. He doesn’t have the chakra control over _elemental_ chakra he’d need to break—or rather, reverse—them, but, given what he’s learned, seals are complicated and delicate. He could figure out how to alter it just enough. The seals would still be there, but useless, harmless.

He could get himself out, if only he knew what happened to Sakura and Sasuke here; he could get the others out, if only he had chakra to do it.

He doesn’t tell Karin.

///

Over the next few days, Riku keeps an eye on the others. Not just Emi, but her in particular.

Some seem to gravitate toward one person more than others; roommates, with some exceptions. Yakumo is equally distant from everyone. Takuma is happy to talk to anyone, and partners easily with pretty much anyone, but especially Keisuke, who also seems popular. Karin isn’t well-liked, but she is respected. Her exact opposite is Yukiko, who most of the people in the hall get along with well enough but try to avoid partnering with her in drills.

Except Hiroshi, who avoids even looking at Yukiko.

Emi, meanwhile, ingratiates herself with everyone. She hovers around Yakumo the most, but flits over to anyone by themselves at least once, striking up a brief conversation. She never talks to anyone for long, just a quick back-and-forth and then she’s gone before the other person can start to get annoyed. (Before, that suspicious part of Riku’s mind points out, the other person can ask _her_ a question.) Like Takuma, she takes frequent naps, though she joins in if the rest of the group is practicing something.

Their hallway performs better on the drills each day; Riku and Karin still need the help, and the others still provide it. The day after no one’s sent to the door, though, the escape training changes.

Instead of hands tied behind their backs, they’re now paired up with their hands tied behind their backs _and to one another_. Who’s tied to who changes in each round; they start off with just wrists bound, then escalate to forearms, then forearms-and-ankles.

Once one person gets free, that starts the cascade, but it takes them days of practice to become fast enough to avoid (becoming target practice) “evasion drills.” (Yukiko claims this sounds better, and if it makes the whole experience less terrible, Riku’s willing to call them whatever. Evasion drills ahoy.)

Without consulting him, the others seem to have decided that Riku gets freed last—he isn’t complaining, though by the third day he’s noticed the pattern. Karin tends to be rescued first, possibly because her aim is good enough to earn the group library privileges, and everyone either wants something to read of the most comfortable chairs to sleep on for thirty minutes.

(He asks during quiet time on that third night why they haven’t been doing this all along. Karin looks at him for nearly a minute, and finally just says, “Every man for himself,” like that’s all the explanation he needs.)

When Riku runs evasion drills, he always gets picked to go to the clinic with whoever else is injured. Since evasion drills are a punishment, that changes daily, though he sees Sen and her friend Yome again (separately). With his arm broken, he can’t toss knives back at the Sound genin—his aim with his left hand isn’t good enough, he’d risk hitting one of the other runners—but word has apparently spread: once there are weapons on the floor, the other recruits start throwing them back, regardless of what halls they’re from.

Sometimes, that makes it hard to run, but Gai or Lee would just see it as an added challenge, so Riku tries to think of it that way, too.

As soon as he gets back to the starting wall from the far wall, he doesn’t wait to be told to join someone else’s lane, he just does it. He isn’t the only one doing that, either; when he sees her again, Sen hops into someone else’s lane _before_ Riku clears the far wall.

After the drills, they go to the clinic. Riku is at home there. He takes command and the others fall in. Down an arm, he has to talk others through most of the procedures, but they’re all genin: there’s always someone with steady hands, and they all take orders.

No one uninjured takes up a bed while Riku’s in the clinic. He only hopes that holds true even when he _isn_ _’t_ there to monitor.

If he has time, he explains why the procedures work, and some basic medical concepts while he’s at it.

For example: peeing on a knife does not disinfect it, it’s just gross. No, you don’t need to _suck out the venom_ , do you understand how many bacteria are in your mouth _at all times_? It’s fine to let someone with a concussion sleep, provided they aren’t throwing up and can answer questions coherently. No, it isn’t actually shocking that a medic-nin is competent even without his chakra, and for that matter, while most medic-nin are women, there isn’t anything _preventing_ men from learning medical jutsu.

///

It’s all going smoothly, which should have been Riku’s clue to be more on guard. But he isn’t. So when one of his patients after an evasion drill says he’s grateful, Riku doesn’t think too much of it. He doesn’t even consider there might be a problem when the patient asks if there’s anything he can help Riku with.

The guard at the door is inattentive as ever; Yome, Riku’s deputy today, is soothing a girl with a limp from a nicked tendon, reassuring her that everything will be fine. The boy is the only other patient in the room, and his wide brown eyes lock on Riku’s face as he insists that Riku find something he can do in repayment.

Riku tries to tell him that teammates don’t need payment; he tries to foist the boy off on some vague, generic “don’t do it again” promise. Neither works. Finally, with a sigh, Riku gives in. Keeping the volume down—the guard may be bored and barely paying attention, but that doesn’t mean he’s deaf—Riku asks if the boy’s seen Uchiha Sasuke (figuring, of the two, Sasuke would probably have the reputation).

He doesn’t expect much and isn’t all that disappointed when the boy shrugs and shakes his head. It’s possible that Sasuke and Sakura never came to Sound to begin with. (Not probable. Where else would they have gone, and still be missing now? Neither of them would join Mist, Rock is notoriously for killing defecting Leaf-nin rather than recruiting them, and Cloud would never get a coveted power like the Sharingan and keep it hidden. There are a dozen smaller villages, but none of them have the kind of power and ability it would take to either tempt or take Sasuke by force.)

The boy asks why, doesn’t want to take Riku’s noncommittal answers, and _that_ _’s_ what finally tips Riku off.

“It doesn’t matter,” he tells the boy slowly, eyes narrowed. “Why do you care?”

The boy backs off after that, and Yome, maybe sensing the tense atmosphere, hops up and comes over, starts regaling Riku with the story of how Sen nailed one of the Sound genin in the _face_ a couple days ago.

///

“I think I messed up,” Riku tells Karin at the very start of quiet time.

She doesn’t hesitate. “Tell me,” she says, giving him her full attention. Her expression doesn’t change as she listens to him; when he finishes, she takes a deep breath. “Yeah, you messed up.”

“Are they gonna—will you be okay?”

Her glasses flash in the light as she pushes them up her nose. “I don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahahaha I had this ready to post a week ago because I panicked and thought I'd said I would. I'm trying to keep my promises here! (That wound up working out really well, because I was out on NyQuil all of yesterday and probably will be again later today. Being sick sucks.)
> 
> Next update should be next weekend, **February 16th or 17th**.
> 
> As a quick note: I have played KH3, and I have Thoughts. We'll see if they manifest into Fic, but for now, rest assured that this story will continue, and KH3 didn't break my plot. (I'll need to consider some things for the later stories, but basically... By the time this story hits KH3 territory, the characters will be in very different places, just like some of them are already in different places before we hit Shippuuden.)
> 
> And while _I've_ beaten the game, a lot of people haven't, so please warn for spoilers in the comments!


	6. Troubleshooting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Sound crosses several lines in short order, Riku does something he doesn't know he can do, and Karin tests some limits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warnings** : verbal and physical abuse, including emotional manipulation; injury; mentions of Riku's past training habits (bad and inadvisable); self-injury.
> 
> After some thought, I'm combining parts of the last few chapters, rather than leave them super choppy. Note the change in story length: there's one more chapter after this, and then the epilogue.

Riku and Karin don’t have long to wait to find out the consequences of Riku’s lapse in judgment. The guard hauls Riku out this time, grabbing him right where the bone is—cracked, probably. Riku cries out at the sudden wave of pain.

It’s worse when the guard drags him, so he catches his balance on the wall and forces his feet under him, walking quickly to keep pace with the guard, who neither looks at him nor speaks to him.

He’s taken to the same room as last time, shoved into the same chair as last time. This time, though, it isn’t Kabuto who comes in, but a young woman in the same outfit as the man who broke Riku’s arm. She was eating dinner with him. Red hair isn’t unique (Karin and Kairi both have similar shades, Karin’s somewhat lighter and Kairi’s darker), but there was only one redhead at that table.

“So, I hear you’re interested in Uchiha Sasuke,” she says, flipping the chair on her side of the table around and sitting in it backwards. The move is the single most fake display Riku’s seen since being kidnapped, and he has to fight not to roll his eyes at it.

He doesn’t say anything, and the girl laughs at him. “What, trying to be all brave and quiet? You already blew it, kid, you might as well come clean. What’s Uchiha Sasuke to you?”

“Friend of a friend,” he says, with a little shrug. It isn’t a lie; it’s just not the whole truth.

The woman cocks her head, eyeing him. “Is that so. And why would you ask about him _here_?”

Riku wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t think Sasuke might be here, so she’s either getting at something else or making him state the obvious. He isn’t about to indulge her, either way.

She laughs again. “Oh, come on. You’re not leaving until you tell me what I want to know. Either you cough it up nicely, or I’ll have to get mean.” She smirks. “Please, _please_ make me be mean.”

His arm throbs. Maybe the uniform is for Orochimaru’s enforcers. She doesn’t look as intimidating as the man, but that just means her specialty lies elsewhere. Riku isn’t about to underestimate someone just because they aren’t physically impressive.

“I don’t know where he is,” Riku says, because that’s true. “It could be Sound.” If it is, Sakura and Sasuke were some of the _first_ genin Sound took; all the recent disappearances only increase the chances that one or both of them is here somewhere.

“Huh. And, what, you thought if you found him, the two of you could escape together? Run off into the sunset?” She sneers at the last few words. “Did you think you could _rescue_ him?”

If Riku had legitimately been kidnapped, would he think along those lines? Yeah, probably; if he’d been legitimately kidnapped, though, he wouldn’t have bothered looking for Sasuke or Sakura after the first day or so. Sound gave him a perfectly good resource in the hallway-squad they stuck him in. He would’ve just used _that_ to escape.

Could still, after this, since Sasuke (and Sakura) aren’t among the recruits or the Sound genin; given the response his question got, Orochimaru either has them squirreled away somewhere hidden, or would really _like_ to have them and is looking for clues.

“So what if I did?” he asks, instead of any of that. “It isn’t like he’s here, anyway.”

She leans back, eyes narrowed, and Riku forces himself not to so much as twitch. It’s a long few seconds before she says, “You think _you_ could rescue anyone? You’re nothing, recruit; you’re trash. You can’t rescue yourself, let alone anyone else.”

Riku knows it isn’t true, and a part of him wants to rub that in her face. He could get out _right now_ , if he was willing to pull out his key and disregard every warning and rule Tsunade gave him.

He can’t, though, so he’s stuck until he figures something else out. (The scrap of paper with the components of the seal might be his ticket out, if he could figure out how to make them _useful_. Maybe Karin will have some ideas—Karin, who clearly didn’t sell him out, since this woman is asking about Sasuke but hasn’t mentioned Sakura once. He’s not about to tell her about the _key_ , but she might be able to help with an escape plan.)

“Aw, do want to tell me I’m wrong?” The woman leans forward, elbows on the table, eyes crinkling with how wide her smile is. “Do you want to _prove_ it? Go on. Hit me. First shot’s free.”

Riku hopes there aren’t genin stupid enough to fall for that trap. “Pass.”

“Jirobu is right, you’re fucking pathetic.” Fast as anything, she reaches out, grabs a handful of hair, and slams his head forward. Riku barely has time to move his arm to cushion it, and that still leaves his head throbbing and his left arm aching with the beginning of a bruise. “I can’t believe Lord Orochimaru was ever interested in a coward like you. You’re useless. You don’t belong in Sound; you belong six feet under.”

She goes on like that for a while, occasionally smacking Riku, once backhanding him off the chair entirely. He tunes her out; fighting back will probably get him killed and will _definitely_ get Karin hurt worse than whatever they were already planning on doing to her.

Still, some of what she says registers, and every time a blow connects, it’s a little harder for him not to at least _try_ to return it. He’s never let a bully just go to town on him, and it chafes something deep inside that he has to do it now.

Finally, she gets bored. She reaches down, pulls something out of a pocket or pouch, and holds it up. A pearl suspended on a thin silver chain.

Kairi’s necklace. Riku’s good hand flies to where it usually rests—but of course, it hasn’t been there for _weeks_ , since Sound kidnapped him, since he woke up in a set of grey clothes just like what he has on now.

The only thing Kairi has left from where she grew up, which she has consistently refused to take back from him every time he’s visited the Islands.

“I know you’ll keep it safe, Riku,” she’s said, each time he tries to give it back. “It’s a promise. As long as you have it, you’ll have to give it back to me, right? So I know we’ll see each other again, no matter what.”

Only apparently Kairi’s faith was misplaced, because Riku stupidly didn’t think to leave it back in Konoha where it would be _safe_ , and now he’s lost it.

“Like I said,” the woman’s smile is keen, bloodthirsty, “the first hit’s free.”

He swings. She catches his fist, slams it into the table, grabs his splinted arm with her other hand, the hand holding the necklace. Digs her thumb right where the bone’s cracked.

He shouts, tries to yank his arm away, even claws at her hand with his left when she lets it go. She doesn’t release him for a minute or two—when she does, he almost collapses onto the table, tears running down his face, blood under his fingernails.

She inspects the scratches on her hand. “Well. They say even a dumb animal will lash out. That’s what you are, Hatake: a dumb fucking animal. Don’t forget it.”

And she leaves him there, taking the necklace with her; unlike Kabuto, she doesn’t tell the guard to wait ten minutes, but it’s still about that long before the door opens, the guard clearing his throat pointedly.

///

When Riku gets back to the room, he hears Karin before he sees her, little hurt sounds accompanied by attempts at measured breathing that break off into whimpers.

She’s on her back when he walks in, arms wrapped loosely around her midsection. Her shirt is hiked up, revealing the first stages of bruises purpling around her lower ribs.

He hisses, kneeling next to her, hands hovering uselessly over the injury. If he just had his chakra, he could—

“It hurts,” she says, and raises one arm up to her face, hesitating before draping it over her eyes, glasses and all. There are old bite-marks all along it, but Riku barely notices them anymore.

“Take some deep breaths for me,” Riku says, because he can’t do much, but he can make sure it doesn’t get worse. “I’m gonna count, and I want you to breathe in, alright? One, two, three…”

It takes six tries before she gets through one deep breath—lungs expanding hurts the broken rib, of course, but he’s trying to prevent pneumonia here. Given everything else he knows about Sound, if she caught that, they’d just let her die from it.

From _pneumonia_ , something completely manageable with even ordinary medicine under most circumstances.

“They wanted to punish me,” she tells him around soft hiccups, “for not telling them about Sasuke… About your questions about him.”

He scowls, but part of him is relieved, too—it sounds like, while this is his fault, he at least didn’t make it worse. With a sigh, he lays one hand gently over her bruised rib, wishing harder than he’s ever wanted anything in his life that he could make this right.

If he could just _heal_ her—

She takes his hand, lowering her other arm to look at him. Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy, tear tracks down her cheeks. He’s sure his face isn’t any better, for all that he wasn’t hurt anywhere near as much as she was.

“Would you fix it?” she asks, voice hushed, eyes wide.

“Of course I would!” His hand trembles, caught in her grip. Or her hand trembles. “You’re _hurt_.”

“I’m not important,” she says. At his glare, she adds, “I’m not. I’m not as important as Sasuke to you, or you would’ve listened to me. I _told_ you they don’t like it when you make plans for people from your village, and you went and asked about a genin you knew. You didn’t _listen_ , because it wasn’t important to you.”

His breath catches, his vision goes blurry. Guilt crawls up his throat and makes a nest there. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”

She shakes her head; he can’t focus on her expression, but her tone is impatient when she says, “I know you didn’t, but that didn’t _matter_ , did it?”

“I’m _sorry_. I would take it back if I could! If I could just—if I could _fix it_ —”

And he turns his tear-stricken glare onto her bruises, above her broken ribs and underneath his helpless hand. The woman from Sound was right. Without his healing, what is he even worth?

Sure, he can run and jump, he can scold people, he can read, but what is he _doing_? So far, he’s gotten Karin hurt a whole lot, learned absolutely nothing about Sakura or Sasuke, and made zero progress on any kind of escape plan. If he left tomorrow, he’d have to report this mission a complete failure.

He wouldn’t even mind so much, if not for this. He made a commitment to help people—he’d told Kakashi he could, that here he could be more than just some kid, and look at him now. Useless, unable to help a girl who keeps getting hurt on his account.

His fingers twitch without any input from his brain. He blinks, clearing his vision in time to catch a sudden wash of green, the ring of bells and the sharp smell of the forest in late spring, warm earth and new growth.

His arm stops throbbing. Beneath his hand, the bruises on Karin’s midsection quickly fade, leaving behind a couple old bite marks.

Her hands come down, probing at her ribcage, poking in ways that would have been too painful mere moments ago. Riku stares, first at her unbruised torso, then at his own unbroken arm. He pokes it himself, even digs his thumb in the same way the Sound woman had, and it isn’t comfortable, but it doesn’t _hurt_.

“Did you know you could do that?” Karin asks, sitting up, staring at him. Her eyes are wide, wider than he’s seen them; her voice is shaky, and she wraps her arms around her chest in a nervous gesture he’s never seen from her before.

“No.” He flexes his hand, checks the seal on that arm: it’s still active, still sucks up his chakra when he tries to mold it. “I don’t know how I did it.”

A pause. They catch their breaths, both staring blankly—Riku at his hands, Karin at Riku.

“Could you do it again?”

Riku considers. The green light vanished as quickly as it came, and even now, the bells and the forest smell are just memories, not lingering. “I…I don’t know.”

She lets him leave it at that; they go to sleep without exchanging any more words.

///

Riku carries the rattled, relieved feeling into his dream, where he stands on a platform he hasn’t seen in about a year. Despite the clarity, it feels more dreamlike, softer, less immediate. There’s no voice, no shadows to fight; as he stands, glancing around, the pedestals from both his and Sasuke’s experiences here emerge from the glass.

The headband is glowing; the knife is missing. Only the scroll remains unchanged. _The path of the mystic_ , says the voice that he barely remembers, the same words it said so long ago. _Inner strength. A scroll of wonder and ruin_.

“I didn’t choose you,” he tells it. Now, a year older, he’s tall enough to pluck it right out of the air, although he doesn’t. “Could I have done more, if I had?”

_The path of the guardian._   _Kindness to aid friends. A symbol to guide all._

He looks back at the headband. When he had this dream—or is it more a vision? Spiritual experience?—he didn’t have his headband until he chose it; in the waking world, he doesn’t have it, either. Sound took it.

Hadn’t he told the genin, though, that Sound _couldn_ _’t_ take their rank from them? The headband is just a symbol; what it represents doesn’t go away.

He spares one last look for the scroll, but it isn’t where his heart lies, not even with the sound of bells and the smell of the forest hanging heavy in his thoughts. (Wonder and _ruin_. Riku’s listened to enough fairytales to know a catch when he hears one.) He walks over and takes the headband, just like last time. “This is my path.”

A bright light like last time, although now it goes on and on, filling his vision until there’s nothing _but_ the light. It feels warm, comforting, not blinding even though it ought to be.

If he has any other dreams after that, he doesn’t remember them.

///

Riku keeps his arm splinted, even though he’s nowhere near a good enough actor to fake injury for long. He can’t think of anything else to do.

The first hurdle comes when the guard opens the door and informs them that Karin is confined to her room for the day.

“A reprieve,” the guard says, with clear contempt, “on account of your injury, by order of Yakushi Kabuto, on behalf of Lord Orochimaru.”

Riku and Karin both blink at him, which earns Riku a face-to-face with the floor. They don’t have time to talk before the guard hustles Riku out of the room.

Serving duty gives Riku the chance to find the boy who ratted him out, younger than most of the recruits around him. Either he’s a Sound plant using his age to fool the people around him, or he’s a legitimate recruit climbing the ranks by snitching on others. Either way, Riku’s tempted to do—something—but reminds himself that this isn’t the time or the place.

A flogging is the last thing he needs, especially when he has no idea how he healed himself and Karin last night. Who knows if he can do it again?

(He does. In the back of his mind, he feels certain that it wasn’t just luck or some random blessing. He _did_ that, and he can figure out how to do it again, just like he figured out how to dive, to zipline, to throw a knife, to use a jutsu. Riku is _great_ at learning and practicing things, and this is something he’s wanted since he laid his hands on Sora and wrecked him: something that can fix the hurt.

Riku is going to _master_ it.)

During the early drills, the guard demands they perform a low punch and the corresponding block. It’s clear from the nervous glances Riku’s way that, although all the recruits here would have been taught these basics, they don’t trust their knowledge or abilities.

Riku leads his row, left-handed, in the strike, demonstrating against an imaginary Karin; after a couple reps, Keisuke fumbles his block and takes a light blow to the kidneys from Yakumo. When the rows split, Riku leads his new group in the proper form of the block.

He has to run suicides twice—has to try to pretend to run with a broken arm, _twice_ —but the recruits are shaping up.

In the escape room, the others get him out of his bindings in time, so he just has to throw with his left hand in the target room. Just like the escape room got harder, though, when they walk into the throwing range, the targets along the far wall are on tracks. One of the guards presses a button and they begin moving.

Groans from the recruits earn a sharp rebuke from a different guard, and knives are passed around. Just like before, the guards tell them when to throw, and when they don’t hit a target—it seems like any target will do, since two people occasionally hit the same one without comment from the guards—it’s suicides.

If he stays here much longer, Riku will be able to keep up with Rock Lee on his runs around the village.

They get to shuriken, but not senbon; Riku gets a handful of knives and stars into various targets, and mostly where he wanted them, too. Emi performs exactly in the middle, while Yukiko and Keisuke continue to shine at long-distance attacks, for all that the moving targets disconcert them.

When the guards bring them back to the practice room for their half-hour of rest, Riku shows everyone how best to perform the new strike and block, then takes a seat next to Yakumo.

She’s got a new paper this time, with the outline of a head, some other lines sketches over it—guidelines, maybe? It looks like she’s tried to draw in the face, but erased it, leaving faint marks that might have been eyes, a nose, a mouth.

“Before, you said that the people are important, more than anything else.”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “That’s how I feel, anyway.”

“You were talking about your friends,” she says. She’s frowning at the picture. “Is there anything they could do to change your mind?”

Riku blinks, not sure what she’s asking, not sure how to even start to answer. “Sorry, I don’t understand,” he finally says. “Do you mean, is there anything they could do that would make me feel…like they weren’t important?”

“Yes.” She looks up, brown eyes catching his.

“No.”

“Nothing?” she presses. “What if they hurt you?”

Riku winces, reminded of Karin saying _I_ _’m not important_ and _that didn_ _’t matter, did it?_ “If they hurt me, it would be on accident,” he hedges, “they wouldn’t mean it.”

“But what if they did?”

Pulled out of his own head, Riku considers that Yakumo isn’t really asking about Sora or Kairi, who she doesn’t even know _exist_. She’s asking for some other reason, which means there’s a point to the question, and avoiding answering it won’t help him or her.

Instead of answering her question, then, he decides to offer her a different train of thought. “About a year ago, I hurt my best friend,” he tells her, looking at his “splinted” right hand. When Sora’s arm broke—when _he broke_ Sora’s arm—it had been worse. What Riku did to Sora was worse than what the man did to him, and that had hurt more than he’d imagined. And Sora’s had been _worse_.

“I broke his arm because I didn’t want to lose a fight,” he says. “I meant it—I meant to hit him, to hurt him, I just didn’t mean to hurt him _that badly_. His mom still hasn’t forgiven me, I don’t think, but he did. I tried to apologize, the next time I saw him, but he wouldn’t let me. He told he knew I was sorry.” Sora had said Riku _should_ be sorry for leaving without saying goodbye, not for hurting him in the first place, with a laugh and his hands crossed behind his head.

“I figure, if our friendship is still important to him after _that_ , I owe him at least as much. So, yeah, even if it _was_ on purpose, I wouldn’t change my mind.”

She stares at him, brows furrowed. “Do you think that’s…common?” she asks, sounding more hesitant than Riku’s ever heard her.

He shrugs. “I can think of a bunch of people who would probably agree with me,” well, Sora and Kairi, and Naruto, and Kakashi… Gai and his team, too, now that he thinks about it… “I think it’s pretty common in Konoha.”

Which she ought to know, but Yakumo seems surprised to hear it. She ducks her head, hiding her eyes in the fall of her hair. “I see.”

Riku figures that’s a dismissal and gets up, wandering over to where Keisuke is trying to teach Hiroshi proper aiming stances. Hiroshi’s aim is almost worse than Riku’s with his left hand, which is…bad.

As he helps the boys, he steals glances at Yakumo. Her pencil is out, and she seems intent on whatever portrait she’s sketching, not looking up even when Emi drifts by and asks her something. Hopefully his words helped her with whatever problem she’s working through.

///

That night, Riku’s relieved to see Karin still in their room. She hushes him when he tries to speak, though, nodding pointedly at the door and then at his book, all but demanding that he read quietly for now.

He does, trying to cross-reference what’s on the scrap of paper with anything else in the book. This involves a lot of flipping through pages scanning for diagrams and earns him a few glares from Karin, and he doesn’t even find anything. After nearly twenty minutes of fruitless searching, he gives up and settles for just studying the seal.

There are three broken lines that curve around his chakra point on each wrist, with eight straight lines of symbols radiating out from a spot just above his veins. The symbols are _tiny_ , and the ones inside tell the seal to only target molded chakra, while the lines are there so the molded chakra drains out of his body and…into the seal? There’s nothing about chakra _storage_ , though, which is the main point of using seals in the first place, most of the time…

The symbols that extend past the lines are related to Yin chakra. The paper doesn’t explain the relevance of _that_ , and Riku’s never even _heard_ of Yin chakra before, but if he gets another chance at the library, he knows what he’s looking for. If this is the sort of basic knowledge that Iruka let him skip to promote him to genin faster, he’s going to be upset with the teacher.

At the end of quiet time, the guard once again drags Karin off; Riku thought at first there was a pattern, but he’s nearing three weeks and it isn’t reliable. The guards take Karin more often than Riku, and he hasn’t been hurt since the first time. There’s no sequence, either; after they both had their arms broken, they were left alone for a couple days before Karin was taken again. It can’t be because of their actions, either: besides Riku’s indiscreet question, they haven’t done anything to warrant Sound’s attention.

They wouldn’t take Karin because Riku spoke to Yakumo, not when she was cooped up in the room—if anything, they would’ve hauled _him_ in for that, and then hurt Karin worse while he was gone.

He’s tense, on guard; if he can _heal_ , he doesn’t have to worry about what they do to Karin (within reason). If he can heal, if he can get Karin’s help, he might be able to get them both out.

(But what about Yakumo, with her sketches of the Hokage Monument and some mystery person? What about Yukiko and Keisuke, who will one day be formidable opponents from a distance, and Hiroshi, who has already improved so much at hand-to-hand? What about little Takuma who tries his best, and Sen and Yome, and all the others? Can he just…leave them all behind, just to get himself and Karin out?

What if he leaves, and reports back to Konoha, and Tsunade says it’s too dangerous to send a rescue mission? Not only is Orochimaru here, but so are Kabuto and the woman and men in the uniforms, and what look like all of Sound’s genin forces. What if Tsunade says nothing can be done?)

Karin comes back, and when Riku opens his mouth, shakes her head and gestures for him to be silent. He waits; she has her eyes fixed on the door.

Minutes bleed into one another before they hear the quiet sound of sandaled footsteps heading away from their door. Karin gestures for him to stay quiet again, and this time, there’s no clear signal, she just relaxes and takes a cross-legged seat next to him on his futon.

“Do you think you could heal on purpose?” she asks in hushed tones.

He shrugs. “I really don’t know. I’ve never done it before, and I don’t know how I did it to begin with. Maybe?”

She stares at him, then crawls over to her bed, reaching under her pillow for—

Oh, wow. She has a wooden _shiv_. It looks like it might have originally been inside a scroll, with one end decorated; the other end has been broken off and carved to a point.

“Let’s practice,” she says, and unrolls the bandages on her arm. After a beat, she stabs herself, right in the middle of a bite mark.

“Hey!” She glares at him, wasting no time in grabbing his pillow and shoving it in his face. He splutters, but she’s paying more attention to the door—to the hallway outside, to the guards who could come in at any second—than to him.

Finally, she turns to face him and waves her arm in his face. “Can you heal it?”

He takes her arm and—with a sour glance at her face, which she returns with a stubbornly-set expression—tries to feel the same way he did yesterday.

How had he felt before? Helpless, useless. Weak. A failure.

Blood trickles down her arm, catching in old scars.

How had he felt? Like the mission didn’t matter anymore. Her accusation that she didn’t matter to him—that she didn’t matter as much as Sasuke, that the living human being in front of him didn’t matter as much as the mission she didn’t know he’d been assigned—had landed like a blow. He doesn’t want it to be true. He doesn’t want to be that kind of ninja, that kind of person.

He wants to help people. Right now, that means Karin. The shiv is still in her arm, which is good thinking; without it, the wound would bleed too freely. If he could use chakra, it would be the easiest thing to stitch the punctured skin back together: Riku’s _good_ at that. He’s practiced that kind of healing more than any other—mostly on himself and Tenten, Lee, and Gai, during training.

(That caused some problems, because half the time he leaves a clone behind in the apartment to do his assigned reading. He _really_ shouldn’t be using jutsu with only half his reserves available. He’s only passed out a couple times, though, and managed to convince the others not to take him to the hospital, so it’s fine.)

How had he felt, the first time he healed someone? Does he count the satisfaction, the relief he felt the very first time he worked in the hospital, the day of the invasion? Does he start from the first time he did it with a jutsu? Does he include the time Kairi skinned her leg in front of him and he fixed it up, as if she hadn’t lost her grip halfway along the zipline and hit the beach rolling?

How had he felt, when Karin’s bruises receded, when her breathing came unlabored?

How had he felt, choosing the ‘path of the guardian,’ telling himself and that disembodied voice that _this is who he is_ , this is his trunk?

How does he feel?

Like he wants to be the one who can fix this. The one who’s there, wherever it’s broken, wherever the person is hurt, and he’s ready.

Like, more than anything, he wants to help. Nothing else is as important as that. It doesn’t matter who’s in front of him—if they’re hurt, he wants to help.

The light comes again, the bells, the smell of plants. The shiv slides gently out of the healing wound; it falls onto the futon between their knees without a sound.

Karin takes it, this time digging it in farther and pulling it out.

Blood drips onto the futon as Riku tries to recapture the feeling. He raises his hands, framing the new wound, and focuses.

It doesn’t seem to want to come, at first; it feels a little like when he’s hit chakra exhaustion, although without any physical exhaustion or other signs of imminent collapse. He keeps trying, though, holding the feeling in his mind rather than tracking drops of blood down Karin’s arm.

When it comes, Riku smells leaves and dirt and new growth before he registers the light, the bells; they all fade as quickly as the last times. On Karin’s arm, the blood starts to dry, tacky. The forest smell overrides the metallic tang, but it doesn’t last.

“I’m getting light-headed,” he tells her before she can reach for the shiv again. It’s true, but he could try one or two more times.

“Rest,” she tells him, and even pushes him down onto the futon. Her expression is unreadable. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you all know how little the FF series has defined the parameters of Cure magic? I went looking to see if this was plausible, and my conclusion is "sure, why not." (I have Thoughts on said limits, but basically--the kinds of wounds you'd get in battle, yeah, it'll help those, to a certain extent. Infection, concussion, burn, poison, paralysis, any kind of disease? lol nope, go learn Esuna.)
> 
> As we're heading toward the end, it looks like there's going to be a gap between when this fic finishes and when the Chuunin Exam fic starts. I've got about 12 chapters planned for that, and only the first two written, so, yeah. We'll see; I may have a couple of super productive weeks. (This fic, for example, was written in one week, and I've been revising each chapter before posting, which has worked out really well--so it is possible!)
> 
> Unlike BN, I think I will be posting the epilogue separately from the last chapter (it's a bit more substantial, for one thing, and...well, it's a stinger, lol). So the last chapter will be going up **two weeks from now** , on **March 2nd or 3rd**.


	7. Release

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of this arc.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warnings:** Medical jargon, handwave-y ninja medical procedures, Riku once again using magic/chakra irresponsibly (the game doesn't let you spam Cure and I'm not gonna let Riku do it, either)

The next day, instead of talking, Karin shoots Riku pointed looks throughout the day and keeps her mouth shut, and then, during quiet time, throws a pillow at his face when he won’t stop hissing questions at her.

Every other minute, her eyes dart to the door. Finally, it opens.

Guards drag Karin out, leaving Riku to wait, tense and wary, for her return. Or for someone else to come through the door. He’s ready, this time: he can heal, and he knows where Karin’s shiv is. (He knows enough about fighting, about the human body, to stab whatever guard or goon comes through the door _without_ killing them. He can incapacitate, now. It’s tricky, easy to mess up, a huge risk he shouldn’t bother taking… But he _can_ do it, if he needs to.)

The door opens for just Karin, though, and as soon as it closes behind her, she staggers over to Riku’s futon, collapsing onto her knees and grabbing his hands.

There are tear tracks on her face, _again_. She pulls his hands to her ribs and it doesn’t take a genius like Shikamaru to figure out what’s happened.

The healing comes more quickly now, and she sags forward, forehead leaning on his shoulder. She doesn’t say thanks, but he figures it’s implied.

“Kabuto thought I fixed myself,” she murmurs into his neck.

He startles, but she stays like that, half-draped over him, and Sound has tried eavesdropping on them before. He can see the practicality of it.

Still, he didn’t like it when Ino put her mouth on his neck, and they’d been dating. He likes Karin’s face there even less; the collar of his shirt is wide, loose, and her face is unpleasantly wet and cold. She’s not trying to lick him or anything weird, but he can feel her breath and it makes him shudder, nose wrinkling.

“Why would he think that?”

“Because I can.” She holds up her arm. At Riku’s clear confusion, she says, “I can heal people when they bite me. Including myself.”

Riku processes that. All the bite marks—there are _so many_ bite marks on Karin. Is each of them a time she’s healed someone?

She’s helped more people than he has, then. (He hasn’t been counting, exactly, which is a problem now that he thinks about it. But Karin has _so many_ marks, whatever number Riku’s gotten to can’t hope to compare.) It isn’t a competition, but some part of Riku takes notice of the fact, forming plans in the dark, damp recesses of his mind. He’d told his uncle he wanted to help people, but that was a vague, formless ambition; he’d told Naruto he wanted to help _him_ , and that’s a much clearer, if larger, goal, with steps along the way that he can track.

Nothing has to change, except now he’ll be more aware of _how many_ people he’s healing, is all. It could turn out that he’s not helping as many as he thinks he is, especially because he’s still a student and there’s so much he doesn’t know. If that turns out to be true, he’ll just have to work harder at healing. That can’t hurt his other goal, either, since practice will make him stronger, faster, better able to help Naruto when the time comes.

(Eleven people, the dark, damp recesses of his mind supply, after sifting through memories. Eleven, counting only the ones that Riku personally healed, without help from anyone else. There are more than eleven bite marks on Karin’s arms alone, never mind the ones on her waist and her legs. He is _behind_. When will he stop losing to all these ninja?)

“So…you’re a reverse vampire.” He blinks, yanking his mind out of one thought and into another. “Wait. Wouldn’t your seal stop that?”

She hesitates, face buried in his shoulder, and Riku’s eyes narrow at the back of her head.

“Karin? Karin. Why wouldn’t your seal stop that?”

“I could tell you that it doesn’t use chakra,” she says quietly, with a sigh, as she shifts back to look him in the eye. She doesn’t look ashamed or defiant, just…calm.

“But you’d be lying.”

“Yeah.”

The technique uses chakra, which her seal _ought_ to stop but doesn’t, so either her seal was specifically made to allow that—unlikely, given that Kabuto broke her rib again—or…

“Emi wasn’t the plant, was she? You were. You _are_.”

Karin sighs again. “Lord Orochimaru wanted some insurance that the strongest recruits would be loyal.”

“So he sent you to spy on me?”

Another hesitation, and then: “It wasn’t supposed to be you, originally. Sound needs more medic-nin. They were supposed to take some girl, and switched targets at the last minute.”

Nice to know Konoha’s engineering of that situation has gone unnoticed. Riku cocks his head at her. “Why would you tell me this? Do you want to escape, is that it? They went too far, and now you want out?”

She glares at him, immediate and intense. “No! Sound is where I belong. They’re the only ones who have treated me as more than—than disposable. I can be an actual _ninja_ here, not just a chakra battery for stupid genin!”

That’s…awfully specific. Riku kind of wants to find who _did_ treat her that way and have some words with them. “Okay,” he says, instead of that. “So then why _are_ you telling me all this?”

Even he knows it wouldn’t be smart to let him just walk around, interacting with the other recruits, knowing all this. At the very least, her cover’s blown.

“There’s someone here, in this base, who I wasn’t able to heal completely.” She grabs one of Riku’s hands, holding it up between them. “I think you might be able to.”

“And what’s in it for me?”

She raises her eyebrows, like he’s dumb just for asking. “I can get you out.”

“How?”

“Depends on whether my idea works. If it does, I have a distraction in mind. If it doesn’t…” A pause, and Riku gets the feeling she hasn’t thought this part of the plan through yet. “I know the patrol patterns. We’ll just slip you past them.”

Great. Riku wonders how long she’s spent hatching this plan—it sounds like the first half of it has been stewing since he first healed her, while she’s throwing the contingency together right in front of him. “And why can’t we do that if your idea _does_ work?”

Her expression, already serious, turns stony. “If Lord Orochimaru finds out that I _knew_ you could heal his best fighter and I helped you escape, I wouldn’t have any future here.”

“Ah.” Fair enough. “One thing.”

“What?”

“If _my_ Kage finds out that _I_ healed Sound’s best fighter and don’t have anything to show for it, _I_ won’t have any future in Konoha.” This is complete bullshit, because Riku’s already planning on telling Tsunade everything and is reasonably sure “I can do weird non-chakra healing” will make up for “which I then used on a couple of Sound ninja, no big deal,” but _Karin_ doesn’t know that.

Riku’s almost certain Tsunade won’t be mad, but he’s also fairly sure that she wouldn’t kick him out even if she was _pissed_ , half for Kakashi reasons and half for Magical Key reasons. Tsunade still doesn’t know he can give the key to other people, and Riku…isn’t exactly sure he wants to tell her. He _knows_ he doesn’t want to tell her that he gave _Sasuke_ the key, at least.

She asked him to give it to her, when he first reported all of it, and it had disappeared right out of her hand and reappeared in his, just like with Kakashi. After that, it seems reasonable to believe that only Riku can use the thing, right? And if Riku’s working for Konoha, that means _Konoha_ is the only village with a Magical Key. That’s probably worth Riku causing a certain amount of irritation.

A “I healed a couple Sound-nin” level of irritation? Riku thinks so, but he isn’t about to tell Karin that.

She bites her lip, eyes narrowing. “Alright, fine. What would your Kage accept? I might be able to get Yakumo out with you.”

Surely whatever her plan is can be adjusted to get a _lot_ more than just Yakumo out, even if Riku has to unlock some doors to do it. What Karin doesn’t know she can’t be held responsible for, though. “I don’t—I mean, that’d be nice, but it’s not what I had in mind.”

Karin huffs, then says, “You want to know about Sakura and Sasuke, right? Well, I never met Sasuke, but I can tell you that they were both here. Sakura and I both worked with Kabuto. Her chakra control is _beautiful_. But…” A sigh. “She and Sasuke both vanished, about a month ago. No one’s seen them since.”

Well, it’s a lead. Riku leans forward; once he gets out, he won’t be able to ask any more questions, so this is his only chance. “When you say vanished, what do you mean?”

“No one saw them leave,” she says. “There are too many patrols for them to have slipped past _all_ of them, and anyway, Lord Orochimaru has video surveillance. There’s no record of them leaving their rooms that day, and no evidence that anyone else broke in and took them.” She shrugs. “It’s like they vanished into thin air.”

Given the key, it’s possible Sasuke and Sakura could sneak out if they wanted to, but Riku’s not sure they could avoid leaving any sign of their escape. And if they _did_ leave, why wouldn’t they come back to Konoha?

—On top of that, now Riku has some proof that they came to Sound willingly. It’s possible Karin is lying or just doesn’t know better, but Riku isn’t confident in either of those explanations. So now he gets to report back to the Hokage that two of his uncle’s students are traitors.

Kakashi won’t be happy; Naruto will be _devastated_. Just the idea of it wrecked him before; how much worse will the confirmation be?

(Riku could just…not tell the Hokage, but that’s a whole different problem.)

“Is that enough?” Karin asks. “Will you help me?”

“Yeah,” he says slowly, shaking himself out of his thoughts. (Is he willing to lie to the _Hokage_ for Sakura and Sasuke? Or would it be lying for Naruto’s sake? Is he willing to do that, even for Naruto?) “Yeah, I’ll help. How’re we doing this?”

///

Karin wasn’t bluffing when she implied her seal doesn’t work: she uses genjutsu to convince the guards that the hallway is silent and empty even as she and Riku sneak past them. She knows her way around a lot better than Riku does, even after days and days of trying to construct mental maps of the base. At every turn and intersection, she peers cautiously around the corner, and if there are guards, she uses genjutsu on them.

Riku’s never seen anyone use genjutsu like that, but it’s handy. He wonders if it’s something only infiltration specialists learn, or if he doesn’t know about this because he’s been hyper-focused on taijutsu and medical jutsu.

Since he’s planning on tackling the Chuunin Exam when he gets out of here, it might be time to branch out and learn some other skills.

(And how much _better_ could his taijutsu be if he can genjutsu the enemy into not seeing him, then body flicker a punch right into their face? _So awesome_. If he can figure that out and teach it to Kairi, he knows it’ll make her day. Sora’s, not so much.)

They make their way to the medical wing. Karin bypasses the clinic room Riku’s spent so much time in, instead taking him to a closed door with a keypad next to the handle. She taps a series of buttons and the door slides open.

Inside is a riot of medical technology centered around one bed. One monitor displays a heartbeat, along with overall average beats per minute and a breakdown of how the beats-per-minute right now compare to yesterday, one week ago, and three months ago. There are a dozen leads between that monitor and the patient's upper torso, arms, and legs.

There’s a monitor hooked up via a carefully-wrapped and secure bundle of wires to a visor over the patient’s upper face. On his lower face is a breathing mask, the steady intake and outflow of breath a nice, rhythmic backdrop to the uneasiness wrapping itself around Riku’s spine and elbowing his stomach and spleen out of the way to make room.

The visor has seals carved into it and wraps around the patient’s head behind his ears, hovering a good three or four inches above his eyes and giving Riku a view of how those eyes twitch and flit around beneath his eyelids.

Rapid-eye movement, or REM, is a part of sleep. It is _not_  typically observed in coma patients.

Without looking at Karin, he strides into the room, heading right for the medical chart at the foot of the bed, where it can be easily accessed by any curious passerby.

Well, any passerby with the code to the room, anyway. That makes the location slightly less silly.

He learned how to read from medical charts. Most of those he shouldn’t have had any access to at all, let alone enough access to pick them up and struggle through unfamiliar vocabulary and medical terms. This is no different, for all that this patient’s chart is easily three or four times as thick as any Riku’s ever read.

The chart identifies the patient (Kimimaro), the problem (aplastic anemia) and the first-line treatment (immunosuppression).

Basically, Kimimaro’s body is attacking itself, and thinks the stem cells in his bone marrow are the problem. Doing anything about the root cause of that has to wait for the immune system to stop getting in the way, hence the immunosuppressants.

Riku gathers that Kimimaro has a cyclical existence: right now, he’s in a medically-induced coma while on cyclosporine (to help the previously-administered anti-thymocyte globulin stop his T-lymphocytes from attacking his bone marrow stem cells). It looks like the coma isn’t strictly _required_. Riku’s not an expert on anemia, but comas are rare enough that he hears about them and what happened, and he’s never heard of an anemic patient treated with one.

Only, before, it looks like Kimimaro wound up back in Medical with a variety of illnesses that his compromised immune system couldn’t handle. Maybe someone—Riku wouldn’t put it past Kabuto—decided that the easiest course would be to just sedate the patient until the issue went away.

Except the issue _never_ goes away, because after a treatment that ought to have worked, Kimimaro relapsed. Again and again, and Sound just kept the same treatment. The medical chart notes Karin’s involvement on three separate occasions—she wasn’t lying about her ability to heal, although she can’t stop his T-cells from going after his bone marrow and she can’t reverse the damage to Kimimaro’s body.

And there _is_ damage, unrelated to the anemia. It looks like his organs show frequent bruising, while some of them are occasionally punctured. That can be healed, but medical jutsu leave scar tissue, and scar tissue accumulates. Worse, internal scar tissue combines to form adhesions, and some of the surgeries in the medical chart are to remove dangerous adhesions. Even if Riku could snap his fingers and fix the anemia, that scarring would still cause this young man problems.

If this was a homework problem Ms. Honda plopped in front of him, Riku would say the solution is to treat Kimimaro as thoroughly as possible and recommend his immediate retirement, and Riku would be confident in that answer, too. Whatever’s causing the relapses is probably ninja-related, and since Karin described Kimimaro as “Sound’s best fighter,” Riku would bet Kimimaro spends his time after recovery on a battlefield or two.

Karin wants Riku to work a medical miracle on a man who gets to live about four nonconsecutive months each year. Kimimaro’s medical chart is clear: he’s getting worse, not better, his recovery taking longer, relapses coming quicker. Sound must have a reason for keeping him alive this long, but it’s only a matter of time before they can’t even do that.

(If the reason is his fighting ability, Riku wonders how good he must be, for four months to earn him the rest of the year in treatment. Kabuto is a far more experienced medic-nin, and Orochimaru used to be _Tsunade’s_ teammate; surely they could reach this same conclusion, given these facts?)

And he’s dreaming, or something close to it. Riku replaces the medical chart at the foot of the bed and steps closer to rest one slow, careful hand on Kimimaro’s chest.

The light in the room is dim, the seal on Riku’s wrist mostly hidden in shadows. Without it, he could determine Kimimaro’s state; he could probe his chakra system, check his bone density, track the progress of drugs in his system. The chart says that someone did that a week ago, and the check-ups come in regular two-week intervals, but Riku’s never liked relying on charts someone else has filled out. It’s inefficient and time-consuming, but he’s always preferred to check his patients himself.

Mariko would have things to say about that, except she’s the same way. Mariko has a lot of opinions about various medical practices and she’s outspoken about them, but she’s no hypocrite.

Ms. Honda has never said anything about it, but then, Riku got the habit from her.

Anzu _has_ scolded him in the past for not trusting his fellow medics, while Tsuru tends to see it as a personality defect. In her words, Riku is “a paranoid, suspicious little shit who’s going to collapse from totally avoidable chakra exhaustion one of these days.”

Ever since she found out from _Mariko_ that Riku fainted from chakra exhaustion in the past, she’s been mildly insufferable on the subject. She also got him a bunch of training scrolls about developing chakra reserves, though; she means well.

Now, Riku can no more run a quick test on Kimimaro than he could examine the man’s bones with his naked eyes. Hinata or Neji could glance at Kimimaro and see how damaged those bones are, where his body is deteriorating from too-prolonged bedrest and not enough exercise.

One of the tasks given to genin assigned to the hospital is physical therapy for patients in comas or just coming out of them. It’s uncommon for ninja, but not as rare a condition as it was on the Islands. Riku can, off the top of his head, think of four jutsu to induce a coma of varying lengths, including one that could edge into “indefinite” if you’re willing to dump a mountain’s worth of chakra into it and don’t care if you also shut down something vital like the lungs. That doesn’t even get into head injuries, issues with medication, and lightning-style jutsu—or, worse, combinations of all those factors.

Regardless of the source, comas mean muscle atrophy. For Sound to induce one when it wasn’t necessary, the medic-nin must have been more concerned with the risks Kimimaro would take than the consequences of months without physical activity.

Karin called him one of Sound’s best fighters, but he won’t be fighting for at least a month after he wakes up. Maybe that will postpone his relapse, or maybe he’ll just start shutting down.

Riku turns to Karin. “Okay, I got the anemia, but what’s causing the internal damage?”

Karin makes a face. “His bloodline limit,” she says, and then, “his bones,” which doesn’t make sense until she explains that he uses them to fight; they _come out of his body_ and he can turn them into weapons or defenses.

Riku kind of wants to strangle everyone involved, starting with Orochimaru, who, as Tsunade’s teammate, _definitely_ knows enough about the human body to know better.

All the problems go back to that, then, and no _wonder_ he keeps relapsing: even with a bone marrow donor, something about pulling his bones out of his body and then shoving them back in must be triggering the immune response, and in the meantime, he isn’t being careful with his organs when he uses his ability.

If _Riku_ were in charge of this guy, he’d sit him down with some anatomy texts and not let him get up until he understands where his bones are _supposed_ to be. This is the sort of ability that is probably fine with very occasional use, but Riku would bet his only chance at freedom that Kimimaro uses it more than “occasionally.”

“Ugh. Okay, I’m gonna need you to leave the room.”

“Wait, what? Why?”

He frowns at her. “To make sure no one comes in and interrupts me. This is gonna take a _lot_ longer to fix than your broken rib.”

“You can do it, though?”

He frowns, shrugs. “Maybe. I’m gonna try. But whatever I do won’t be _that_ much more permanent than what you do unless he takes it easy. If he keeps throwing himself onto the front lines, he’s going to die, sooner rather than later.”

In fact, Riku would bet that Karin’s healing _would_ have been permanent, if Kimimaro hadn’t been out fighting literally the next day. (He assumes, based on the medical chart.) It didn’t fix his organs, but _that_ isn’t fatal, not yet.

She frowns at him, but does leave the room, telling him to knock on the door once he’s done. He assumes she’ll knock if she sees anyone coming.

With her out of sight, he checks the room for video cameras. He’s fairly sure there won’t be any—Kimimaro isn’t under surveillance, after all, since he’s a loyal Sound-nin and in a coma besides—but he’s never been able to determine whether Sound’s surveillance of the recruits is _just_ from the guards’ physical presence or if there’s more to it. He doesn’t find anything, though, so he moves on to step 2.

Riku summons his key. As always, the key comes immediately, with barely a thought; it fits in his hand like it was made for him. The hilt and shaft both look like they’re made of pearl, while the guard and the four-pointed star at the top look like silver. He knows from experience, however, that the key is stronger than steel, that each edge of the star is as sharp as its points, that the grip is porous enough not to slide in his hand even if he tried to swing it in the ocean.

The star at the top is as almost as big as both his hands placed together, joined to the shaft at the intersection of two points. It looks like a giant X when he holds it up, and Tenten would criticize its functionality, but its primary use isn’t as a weapon, so Riku ignores that.

The key is overlarge to hold in one hand and point at the other, but he manages.

The seal is locking is chakra, so it seems simple to him. The key _unlocked_ Sasuke’s mind (although not Kakashi’s), didn’t it? And it can lock and unlock doors that _don_ _’t have locks_. It even unlocked the chakra inhibitor _locked_ onto Naruto. This seems easy.

Nothing happens.

Riku tries jiggling it. He tries pointing, tries—carefully—thrusting the key toward his wrist, mindful of sharp points and edges. Each time, he expects to see the beam of light, and each time, it fails to appear.

Well. That’s. A problem.

With a sigh, he makes the key disappear, considering his options.

He didn’t grab the scrap of paper with the details of the seal, but he mentally reviews what he remembers, trying to figure out if Karin might be able to release it. He can heal Kimimaro, call her back in, and then have her release the seals so he can check that it worked.

Without his chakra, any escape plan is going to be…problematic. He’ll either be relying entirely on Karin or risking revealing the key, and he may not be able to convince or trick her into helping more recruits escape.

Tsunade’s plan might have been for Riku to get out alone, but that was never something Riku was going to be able to do.

As he thinks through the details of the seal, though, the key reappears in his hand. He startles, almost dropping it, but before he can really react, there’s the beam of light he expected. It travels from the top of the key, the center of that star, to his wrist, tracing first the curved lines, then the symbols that had been inside the circle those lines formed, then the outside symbols.

When those last marks fade, they burst into light, without sound or heat. Riku wonders if that’s his chakra, sucked into the seal and held there, now released harmlessly, but he doesn’t know enough about seals or his key to say for sure.

He switches hands, holding the key in his left and pointing at his right, and the process repeats.

Then he, after dismissing the key with significantly more goodwill toward it, takes the pen clipped to the medical chart and free-hands his best approximation of the seal, careful not to put or leak _any_ chakra into it, lest he turn his wrists into bombs like Sen warned. When he’s satisfied that they’ll pass a cursory inspection, he turns to the bed.

Riku uses his newly-unlocked chakra to run a quick scan on Kimimaro, confirming that his bones are the _worst_.

With a deep breath, Riku concentrates on the same emotions and memories that have worked so far. The key once again reappears in his hand unprompted, which—is going to be a problem, if this keeps up, since Riku is _not_ supposed to use it outside the privacy of his apartment, on the Hokage’s orders.

The handle of the key grows warm. Riku glances at it and raises it to point at Kimimaro.

There isn’t a flash of light—this isn’t any kind of lock—but there is that wash of green, a waft of growing-plants smell, bells ringing. It all seems a little more intense, a little more focused, than it had been before. Riku runs another medical scan on Kimimaro.

A lot of the organ damage heals while Riku’s scanning. The anemia doesn’t change. With a frown, Riku tries again (and tries and _tries_ before it works), scans again.

The third healing washes out most of the immunosuppressants, while it takes a fourth for Riku’s scan to detect bone marrow stem cells. He would need a specialty in—Leviathan only knows—bones, cellular biology, _something_ , a specialty he _does not have_ to determine whether the stem cells are compatible with Kimimaro’s now no-longer-suppressed immune system.

Since he doesn’t have that, Riku waits, feeling more tired than he has since the last time he passed out from chakra exhaustion _months_ ago, and then scans Kimimaro again, checking specifically for whether his body has turned on itself.

There’s no sign that his T-cells have a problem with his bone marrow, thank every god in the universe. Riku isn’t sure he has another healing in him. Vision swimming, he staggers over to the door, dismissing the key as he goes, and knocks lightly.

“I think that’s as good as I can do,” he says once she’s in, the door safely shut behind her. He’s slumped against the wall, but maybe it will look like a deliberate lean.

“Is he better?” She examines the monitors even as she asks.

“For now. Nothing you or I will do can fix him for good if he keeps using his bloodline limit the way he has been. Sound must know that.”

With a sigh, she says, “It’s something, anyway. Can you pull me into a scan, or will that put you on the floor?”

“I’m fine.” He walks over to her to prove it—he’s barely tapped his chakra reserves, and scanning jutsu cost him about as little as body flickers these days—places one hand on Kimimaro’s chest, starting the scan, and takes hold of Karin’s hand with the other.

Ms. Honda and Anzu have both linked with him during a scanning jutsu, but they always initiate it, not him. He’s given medic-nin chakra before, too, which is a similar process, but also one that he’s only experienced from the receiving end. Pulling Karin in is easier than he expects, though: he just reaches out with his chakra, finds hers, and tugs.

As the medic running the scan, he gets to choose what areas to focus on and how intense that focus is, the level of detail the jutsu returns to them directly proportional to how much chakra he pours into it. He sweeps over Kimimaro’s organs (now with 100% less scar tissue), then pushes down, down, all the way to the smallest parts of Kimimaro’s bones.

It takes more chakra to check at this level, and that’s now multiplied since he’s bringing Karin along, but Riku has plenty of chakra for this. He makes sure to highlight the presence of those stem cells in Kimimaro’s marrow, the lack of cyclosporine or anti-thymocyte globulin, the way Kimimaro’s T-lymphocytes are _not_ attacking anything.

Then he spins them up, up, and out, ending the scan only when they aren’t still receiving input from it; doing anything else would give Karin vertigo, and might send Riku onto the floor, likely puking and possibly passing out. His equilibrium is coming back, but the chakra use hasn’t helped any.

“You actually did it,” Karin says, sounding more shocked than she should, considering it was _her_ plan.

He frowns. “Didn’t you think I could?”

“I thought you could do _something_. But you… My healing accelerates the natural process. Yours _reversed_ all the damage.” She’s staring at him now, wide-eyed.

When she puts it like that, he understands the shock. Medical jutsu can’t do that; they aren’t time-travel jutsu. Once damage is done, it can heal, but it can’t be _un_ done. The body collects scars. Cells have a limited number of regenerations in them until they just quit.

Riku didn’t check, but based on everything else, he wouldn’t be surprised if Kimimaro’s cells are all basically brand new, at the beginning of their life cycles. Probably he and Karin have the same thing, at least where they’d been hurt.

What he’s done, it isn’t medical jutsu. It doesn’t use chakra. Just like the way the key can lock and unlock things it shouldn’t be able to, the healing has fixed things that ought to be unfixable. And this time, the key seemed to want Riku to use it as a channel—and those times, the healing seemed more powerful.

The key is magic. So now Riku has key magic _and_ healing magic at his disposal.

Riku swallows. That’s…valuable. More valuable than he can process right now. And Sound knows about part of it. Karin might be wrong; when Orochimaru finds out that Riku escaped on her watch, after finding out what he can do, Kimimaro’s restored state might not be enough to save her.

“Karin…” he starts.

He doesn’t get to finish, because she shoves her arm in his face.

“Bite me,” she tells him. “It doesn’t just heal injuries. It can restore chakra, too.”

Riku stares at her arm—at least half-a-dozen bite marks that he can see—and then meets her eyes, pushing her arm down gently. “No thanks. I’ll be fine.”

She frowns. “You can’t escape in that condition.”

Riku isn’t swaying on his feet anymore, his vision is fine (for the most part), and his stomach is trying to crawl up his throat. “About that. What if you’re wrong, and Orochimaru is mad you let me go?”

Her eyes are still too wide when she stares at him. “You’re worried about me? You haven’t even escaped yet.”

Well, yeah, that’s the point. He makes a face. “Look, we can figure out a different plan, one Orochimaru won’t trace back to you. Or you can come with me—”

Karin shuts him up with a hand over his mouth. He pulls back, and she lets him. Her expression is serious, but not annoyed as it so often is.

“We had a deal,” she says. “I know you’re a stupid Leaf-nin and you want to save everybody, but we aren’t _actually_ teammates and I don’t _want_ to leave Sound. If you want to see your village again, you’ll stick to the plan, got it?”

“Got it.” Even to himself, Riku sounds sullen.

“Good. Now, I’ll need some time to arrange the distraction. I’ll drop you off at the room, and tomorrow morning, just pretend like nothing’s changed, alright?”

Riku nods, still sulking. If she doesn’t want to come, he might be able to force her, but how is that any different from Sound kidnapping genin? If she stays, though, she might be risking her life. It’s her choice to make, but Riku wishes she would make a better one.

Karin takes Riku back to the room and leaves him to sleep it off while she…does whatever arranging she still needs to do. He means to stay awake until she gets back, but even though his chakra reserves are still very much in what he considers the “safe zone,” exhaustion drags him into slumber.

///

Karin shakes Riku awake with a hand over his mouth. They change quickly, ready to go when the guards open the door.

Unlike the last morning after Karin’s ribs were broken, there’s no special order that she stay in bed. The guards don’t pay her or Riku any special attention, don’t seem unduly wary or hostile, but they could be acting. This could be a trap.

Karin could have double-crossed him. He doubts it, wants it to be untrue, but the possibility is there.

Riku’s on guard, and only just keeps himself from twitching looks over his shoulder every other minute.

The guards take them along the usual route to the cafeteria, only to halt unexpectedly. Seconds later, the reason comes crashing through a wall: a young man with orange hair and a giant mallet for an arm stands up from the rubble, then turns to the group of guards and recruits.

The guards start pushing the recruits back, which the young man doesn’t seem to like at all. Quicker than Riku expects, he leaps forward and collides with a guard, knocking the man onto the floor. A second guard, attempting to intervene, gets slammed into the wall, only ducking down seconds before the mallet goes through where her head would be.

The wall breaks apart under the young man’s arm, and Karin nudges Riku in the back. She isn’t the only one to notice, either: a couple of the guards have positioned themselves to block the opening, and Emi has latched onto Yakumo’s arm, dragging the unresisting girl back toward the bedrooms.

Riku makes a snap decision, and rather than deal with the guards and the young man first, he turns back and heads for the two girls.

Emi squawks when he pulls her off Yakumo, but none of the guards are paying attention. If she is a Sound agent—maybe Karin was telling the truth, maybe she wasn’t—then Emi will have fake seals and access to her chakra. Yakumo won’t.

Yakumo might like Sound better than Konoha, though. _Riku_ wouldn’t, but he can’t make someone else’s choices for them. “Do you want to go back to Konoha?” he asks. “Or would you rather stay here?”

She blinks at him, then looks away. “No one will care.”

“That’s not an answer.” Behind him, the guards are trying to immobilize the young man, who, based on sound alone, is intent on ruining the structural integrity of this hall. It’s only a matter of time before the commotion attracts more guards and even the higher-ups. “If you think you’ll be happier here, I’ll go, but I’m not going to leave a Leaf-nin behind.”

That catches her attention; her head jerks up, eyes wide, before she frantically shakes it. “I’m—I’m not. They said I couldn’t be a genin.”

Riku doesn’t know anything about that, but, “Fine then, I won’t leave a _teammate_ behind if I can help it.”

“Neither of you is going anywhere,” Emi says, and then catches herself. “None of us are! You can’t think we can really escape, can you?”

Saying the word out loud catches _everyone_ _’s_ attention, and even the recruits who let themselves be pushed back perk up at it. In one sentence, Emi swings the focus away from the recklessly-swinging young man and onto the holes in the wall he’s opened.

Yakumo isn’t the first to react, but she’s the one Riku’s looking at. When she starts to run in the direction of the wall, he takes that as her answer and follows.

Unlike the others, though, Riku has chakra. When the guards grab at the recruits, he body flickers in their way, blocking their grabs and stealing a couple of knives for himself.

He isn’t the only one with that thought; these recruits have been trained to throw accurately even when they’re tired and scared. After Hiroshi scores a hit on the meat of a Sound-guard’s thigh, a cheer goes up, and then it’s distilled chaos, not helped when more guards join the scene, soon followed by the other halls of recruits.

Riku and a handful of others dash through the melee and the broken wall, pursued by the young man, who shouts at them to stand and _fight_ him. Every time the group of escapees hits a wall, he’s there, mallet-arm just slow enough to dodge, powerful enough to knock down even the thick stone walls of the base.

 _Conspicuously_ slow enough to dodge, in Riku’s opinion, but if this is Karin’s distraction, he isn’t about to stop and question it.

In a matter of minutes, well over a dozen recruits spill out of the last wall, the young man hanging back and shouting at them before turning in a rage on the guards who follow.

Definitely Karin’s distraction. She probably didn’t _intend_ for Riku to take a bunch of other people with him, but there’s no help for it; even as he pauses, some of the genin from other halls rush the opening, dodging past the guards, some sending knives or other improvised weapons at those guards.

A tug on his arm, and Riku looks up to see Yakumo pulling on him.

“You said we’re teammates,” she says as he gets to his feet. “Teammates don’t leave each other behind.”

With a nod, Riku joins her and the small stream of others running out and away. He doesn’t look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The epilogue will be posted **next weekend** , either March 9th or 10th.
> 
> Right now, it's looking like the next fic, which will be centered around Riku's Chuunin Exam, will start going up at the end of the month, since I want to get most if not all of it drafted before posting. In the meantime, check out _the best people I know are looking out for me_ , which will probably update at least once in the meantime.


	8. Epilogue: Two Debriefs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two genin report in to their respective Kage on their completed missions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content warnings:** Tsunade drinks and mentions her gambling problem in the first half.
> 
> _Timeline:_ This is about three months before Gaara becomes Kazekage, and 8 months before the Akatsuki begin their hunt for the jinchuuriki/bijuu. (Well. Before those things happen in _Naruto_ canon, anyway.) We're still about 10 months out from _Kingdom Hearts 1_ , as well. :)

Tsunade knows, from the earliest reports she gets back, that she’s going to need to drink after Hatake Riku’s debrief.

Tenzou, after insisting she send him to shadow the medic-nin students, seems perfectly content with his decision to leave Riku in the outpost to bring the report to Tsunade personally. That’s one warning. The other is the length of the report.

Hatake Riku’s initial debrief by the commander of the outpost reveals that the mission was a partial success: Riku was unable to locate Haruno or Uchiha, but he did determine Orochimaru’s purpose in capturing so many students and genin.

He also took the liberty of not only escaping, but of _staging a jailbreak_ , liberating nearly two dozen ninja from the base. Some of these—in particular, a pair of Sand kunoichi—their home villages sent in as agents, much like Riku himself. Once inside, they had chakra-draining seals placed on them and could not return to their villages.

Doubtless, some agents remained in Sound, forgoing the opportunity to report in favor of digging in. Others may have escaped without feeling any need to let Konoha know. Tsunade may hear from their Kage, in that case. She may not. She isn’t the newest Kage anymore—Terumi Mei took that distinction two weeks ago, and Tsunade hopes she finds joy in it—but that doesn’t mean the old men _respect_ her.

When Sand finally decides whether they’re _really_ willing to place a child in charge, maybe then Rock and Cloud will respect Tsunade. She isn’t about to hold her breath waiting, though.

In the report on Riku, the commander includes a list of four ninja who approached her about joining Konoha. There’s a strong possibility at least one of them is an agent, but that’s for T&I to determine. All four cite Riku’s actions as their reason for wishing to join; even if they’re duplicitous little sneaks, they felt that _something_ Riku did would supply a plausible enough cover.

Tsunade pulls out her bottle and reads on.

Riku detailed to the commander Sound’s methods. Tsunade will give that to Ibiki, along with the names and reports on the four would-be-turncoats. Riku did _not_ mention his key to the commander, which is one bright spot.

Casting a surreptitious glance at Tenzou, still at attention, Tsunade turns to the next page of the report.

The day after the escapees entered the outpost, Riku led those who remained (seven departed at various times, some with warning and others without) in drills. Tsunade recognizes the account as _Maito Gai_ _’s_ standard morning exercises for his students, because she has had to supervise them to make sure Gai didn’t take part and exacerbate his injuries.

Riku then took it upon himself to offer instruction to a large group of genin and students from _across the ninja villages_ ; he was not alone in this. Several others also coached those around them, without regard for where they came from. After that, the group moved on to ranged drills interspersed with running exercises.

After _that_ , several of the children—some as old as eighteen, but based on what she’s reading, Tsunade can’t help but picture _young children_ —taught one another jutsu. Nothing restricted or terribly unique, at least until Kurama Yakumo—Konoha’s most gifted genjutsu prodigy, who the old man removed from the Ninja Academy—decided to make it snow. The others went ahead and staged a snowball war, pulling in not only all the children but most of the outpost staff as well.

Tsunade would expect this nonsense from Naruto. Apparently, it’s contagious. She takes a drink, considers who Riku is related to, and decides that it could have been worse.

After the snowball fight wound down, Riku demonstrated and then walked the group through basic first aid and medical techniques. Nothing fancy—no scanning, no transfer—just CPR and the quick diagnostic that will tell you which injury your ally will bleed out from first. Medic-nins, removed from the battlefield since the Third Shinobi War, don’t bother with the jutsu anymore, since a scan is standard practice and gives more information.

Did Honda Nao teach Riku an outdated, if still useful, jutsu, or did he find it on his own and learn it well enough to teach it to others, some with far more extensive ninjutsu experience than his own?

According to multiple witnesses, the liberated children followed Riku’s directions with unwavering focus. Once the lesson ended, some genin headed back to their villages and others settled in for a second night. Riku was mostly left alone—except that he was never actually _alone_. At least a handful of the children would stay in any room he was in, following him discreetly if he moved.

The Mist pair concern Tsunade almost as much as the Cloud boy; a Sand genin taking an interest in a Leaf-nin is less shocking now than it would have been several years ago, and the Kurama girl attaching herself to another Leaf-nin is unexpected more because of the girl’s personal background than anything else.

“Did Hatake found a _cult_ ,” Tsunade asks, rubbing her eyes without concern for wrinkles.

“Kurama-san frequently referred to him as her teammate,” Tenzou says. “The others preferred the term ‘squad.’”

Lovely. Tsunade does _not_ want to deal with A accusing her of poaching a genin, and although the new Mizukage seems saner than Yagura, Tsunade isn’t about to bet on a Mist-nin’s composure.

“Tell me this is just a phase.”

“This is just a phase,” Tenzou says blandly. If he’s smiling when Tsunade glares at him, his mask hides it.

“Alright. Fetch Hatake and send his flock of admirers back to their own villages. Do _not_ leave Kurama alone with him.” Hopefully, someone else in the outpost has had the basic sense to keep them apart, or at least under watch.

A girl who can turn genjutsu into reality is a headache on the _best_ day; Tsunade prays, abstractly, that she hasn’t done anything to Riku. Kakashi will probably—hopefully—be able to break it, but how _that_ man will react to that scenario promises a _migraine_.

Tenzou leaves with the speed and efficiency of any ANBU, and Tsunade finishes reading the reports.

Then she drinks. She finishes that bottle. By the time Riku’s back in the village, she knows to have a third _and_ fourth handy, and that’s without knowing that Riku has now manifested _godlike healing powers_.

The boy has the good sense to lead with that, at least, so Tsunade can get her drinking started early in the debrief.

He could do _so much_ with that power, if she took over his training. He demonstrates the healing in front of her, _on_ her, and she knows, down to her bones, that this, combined with the Creation Rebirth jutsu, would surpass anything she’s capable of.

The range of his healing is limited, but there are ways to work around that, and Riku’s both young and new to this power. Those limits might be malleable; even if not, combining _a near-complete reset of cellular growth_ with the Creation Rebirth jutsu in even extremely limited contexts is. Unimaginable.

Riku reports healing a Sound agent and Kaguya Kimimaro. Tsunade’s teammate is no fool; by now, he’ll have realized what Riku did, what the implications are. With Riku, Orochimaru might not even _need_ to change bodies.

If Haruno and Uchiha were still in Sound, Tsunade would order Riku under immediate house arrest and around-the-clock ANBU surveillance. Even with that intel, Riku is still at risk, but Tsunade can afford to not be hasty. Riku won’t willingly go to Sound, now, and he’s capable enough to keep out of Orochimaru’s clutches with a much less obtrusive guard. Instead of a detail of an ANBU squad at all times, a full squad taking shifts as singles or pairs should be enough.

“Is that _really_ necessary?” he complains.

“Yes.”

He sighs but doesn’t protest further. Tsunade, who had teenage boys as teammates, recognizes his expression as “going along for now.” At the first opportunity, he’ll try to slip away from them, with no understanding of why that kind of security breach will be terrifying.

Riku reports that Orochimaru doesn’t know about his key. He reports that he only used it once in Sound, to remove his seals and bolster the healing of Kimimaro.

Tsunade will move forward under the assumption that Orochimaru knows _everything_ that happens in his lair. It’s Orochimaru. For good measure, she makes Riku stand there while she explains it.

“I _checked_ for surveillance,” he grumbles, but has he been trained by counter-intel on how to do that? No, no he has not.

That the key can work on seals is another complication. Tsunade assigns Riku a classified B-rank mission to figure out the parameters of that power and report back to her, because the implications… Well.

Akatsuki is interested in the jinchuuriki, all of whom have seals. Seals are prevalent across all ninja villages, and even civilians use them. Someone who can just…unravel them? Tsunade can’t think of a village that _wouldn_ _’t_ commit murder to have Riku working for them. She can think of several that would commit genocide rather than leave him under anyone else’s control.

Maybe Orochimaru doesn’t know, but Tsunade had to give up stupid, risky bets when she took the hat. If he _does_ know, it’s only a matter of time until he makes a move.

Riku’s getting an ANBU guard, and Tsunade won’t teach him anything that could be used against Konoha. That will have to be enough. (She should lock him up, but she’s sentimental enough to take that much of a risk. Riku is one of Naruto’s few friends, and just wants to help. He has no idea what he’s capable of, what he could do. What others could use him to do. Unless—until—that changes, she’ll let him continue along the path he’s chosen for himself.)

Once Riku leaves, Tsunade has Shizune clear her schedule and gets fantastically smashed.

///

Kabuto has spent the last fifteen minutes tearing Karin’s plan apart, from her first overtures all the way to the chaotic end. He criticizes her lack of subtlety, her disregard of consequences, every single one of her choices—even the ones she made sure to get permission for _from him_.

It’s no worse than she’s heard before. The worst part is Lord Orochimaru, sitting silently and listening to all of this. He makes no move to interrupt Kabuto.

She might have gone too far.

She didn’t realize that Riku would take nearly half of the recruits with him; she’d thought, at most, a handful of the ones from their hall might follow. When she’d gotten permission to see if Riku could heal Kimimaro, she hadn’t thought of Juugo, and then it was too late to try to get permission because she had to get Riku out before free time the next day.

Now, she second-guesses herself. Would it have been _that_ bad, if Riku stayed just one more day? (Yes; what she realizes, and what has escaped Kabuto, is that Riku would have done exponentially more damage if given more time to consider, to think. He’d already identified all the recruits as genin and his hallway as his _squad_ , and Kabuto thinks she should have given Riku time to _plan_ and _organize_ the escape? He thinks he could have squashed it without losing just as many recruits, and alienating the ones who were left?)

Kabuto goes on, and finally, Lord Orochimaru interrupts. “What did you learn?” he asks, eyes piercing through her.

She takes a deep breath and disgorges information.

Hatake Riku shouldn’t have been here to begin with: he showed no defiance of authority and little recklessness; on the contrary, he displayed a consistent regard for his fellows and concern for their well-being. He took activities meant to foster competition as challenges in complex teamwork, and setbacks only spurred him on harder.

“His critical thinking is limited,” she adds, in case Lord Orochimaru gets the impression that Riku is exemplary or—worse—that her account is suspect. “He accepted the seals with minimal testing. He made no attempts to escape prior to the successful attempt. He didn’t seek out those from his village. He didn’t form any alliances.”

Lord Orochimaru hums. “He didn’t act until he was sure of the situation. And from what my other agents tell me, he made a reputation for himself in a matter of days. Or do you disagree?”

She twitches at the mention of other agents. Most of the injuries were deceptions, but there was no way to fake a public flogging without extensive jutsu use that _some_ of the genin would be sure to notice. Riku’s first, miraculous healing took care of it, but she still remembers how that first strike felt, the pain mingled with the affront.

“He could have leveraged that,” she admits, “but he wouldn’t have. That’s what I meant. He treated the time in the clinic as…a service, not an opportunity.”

Lord Orochimaru turns to Kabuto. “All without any training from my former teammate. I wonder what her plan is…”

Kabuto shrugs. “We have no indication that Tsunade interacts with him any more than the other genin.”

“And yet, he was asking about Uchiha Sasuke.” Lord Orochimaru’s eyes fix on Karin. “Does he know about Sasuke-kun?”

With a nod, she says, “It was his condition for Kimimaro. He refused to leave the room until I told him.” An exaggeration, but not one they can catch her on; one of the first things she did as soon as she entered the room was destroy the recording equipment hidden in it.

After two weeks, you’d think they would have stopped trying. The first time Kabuto pulled her in for a mission update, he’d scolded her for it, but she _changed_ in that room. (That’s her story and she’s sticking to it. Consistency is key in these situations.)

“I see. Hm…” And Lord Orochimaru adopts a faraway look.

Kabuto waits several beats before turning back to Karin. “Describe how he healed you.”

She has already, three times. She does it again. Whatever Riku did, it isn’t something Kabuto and Lord Orochimaru were expecting; they also weren’t expecting the thoroughness of his healing of Kimimaro. (Kabuto had been particularly disbelieving—no, that wasn’t it, _unsettled_ —that Riku had been able to scan that deeply, _and_ pull Karin into the scan, _after_ healing Kimimaro.)

“It seems to be similar to my own ability,” she offers.

Kabuto frowns at her. “Explain your reasoning.”

“It heals the injuries, more completely than jutsu that merely accelerate the body’s natural processes. It isn’t a complete reversal, but the cells show fewer long-term effects.” She splays her hands over her ribs. “I have very little scarring.” None from the break. “An ordinary medical jutsu would have left more signs.”

Kabuto raises his eyebrows at that, but before he can comment further—or ask any other questions she’s already answered multiple times—Lord Orochimaru blinks, focusing his gaze first on Karin, then on Kabuto.

“Has the footage been prepared yet?” he asks, and when Kabuto, after only a brief pause, nods, he waves at Karin. “Come with me. Let’s see how Hatake worked a miracle.”

Lord Orochimaru dismisses the security guards with a significant look at Kabuto. Kabuto nods, barely perceptible. Distantly, Karin wonders whether these guards will simply be disposed of, or if they’ll become test subjects.

She’ll either see them again or she won’t.

The footage is a little grainy, black and white, but there are five screens in front of them, each with a different angle. At first, the room is empty, and then Karin and Riku come in.

Karin pays more attention to her superiors’ faces than the conversation she was present for. Kabuto begins to scold her for giving away Kimimaro’s _kekkai genkai_ , but Lord Orochimaru raises a hand and Kabuto quiets.

On the screen, Karin leaves the room, and Riku watches the door for a long moment before—

Well, before completing one of the most rudimentary surveys of a room that Karin’s ever had to watch. He checks the equipment around Kimimaro (missing the camera embedded in the visor); he checks the corners (missing the two cameras in the door, one at the top of the frame and one built into the doorknob). He doesn’t even think to look under the bed or in the bedside table, where the bulkiest cameras are.

Karin expected him to find and disable those but miss the others. Instead, he found _nothing_. This is what she meant when she mentioned his limited critical thinking skills.

The Riku on the screens, satisfied that he’s alone and unwatched, summons… _something_.

At a gesture from Lord Orochimaru, Kabuto pauses the videos, then rewinds briefly. He plays the summoning several times before leaving the footage paused after the brief flash of light clears.

The weapon in Riku’s hand must be light-colored, as it barely shows on the recordings. He handles it like a light practice pole, not like a weapon at all. It has a straight-edged Fuuma shuriken attached to the end and a decorated hilt, and Karin has never seen anything like it.

At Lord Orochimaru’s signal, Kabuto plays the footage, and they all watch. They watch as Riku points it at his seals—nothing happens—and then tries, repeatedly. Clearly he _expects_ something to happen. And then…

And then he dismisses it, only for it to reappear in his hand a minute later at no signal from him. When he points it next, there’s another flash of light before his seal…unwrites itself, ending in yet another light show. Kabuto pauses the footage again.

“How could he have summoned it, then?” Karin asks, then squeaks; she knows better than to speak without permission.

Lord Orochimaru gives no sign of displeasure, though. “Hm. Something different… He doesn’t have the reserves to overwhelm those seals on his own, does he?”

“No,” Karin and Kabuto both say, and Karin feels her face heat up when Kabuto sends her a raised-eyebrow look.

Lord Orochimaru hums, and waves at Kabuto to play the footage.

Riku uses the same weapon to get rid of his other seal, then heal Kimimaro. The recording doesn’t show the green light and couldn’t hope to capture the smell of the technique, but Karin notes with interest that there’s no evidence of the bells, either. An auditory hallucination, or something else?

Riku heals Kimimaro _repeatedly_ and scans him after each attempt. Kabuto’s frown grows more pronounced each time Riku raises the weapon until, finally, Riku almost knocks into the bed and seems content to stop.

The weapon vanishes on Riku’s journey to the door, and Karin frowns as deeply as Kabuto when she realizes that she hadn’t truly gauged Riku’s level of exhaustion. She’d thought he was a little tired—light-headed, he’d said the first time they’d experimented, and she noticed the stumbling and the slight slurring of his words—but now, she sees that healing Kimimaro took much more energy than she’d thought.

And he _still_ had enough energy to not only scan Kimimaro, but also to refuse biting her.

Once the two recorded figures leave, Kabuto pauses it and turns to Lord Orochimaru.

“I’ll be looking forward to our agent’s first report.” Lord Orochimaru…smiles. “Riku may be suitable after all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)
> 
> This fic was SUCH FUN to write. I think I've mentioned before that I drafted it in basically a post- _SpiderVerse_ fugue state wherein I wrote about 20k in six days. There were some unexpected changes in the revision process (hi, Kurama Yakumo, glad to have you onboard), but for the most part, once I knew what I was doing with this, it went pretty smoothly.
> 
> Bad news: the next fic isn't close to ready yet. I'm hoping to get it finished by the end of March or early April, but I don't know that that will actually happen.
> 
> Good news: I have the three phases of the Chuunin Exam plotted and about three chapters written so far. It's looking like a 10-12 chapter story, so I'm maybe a third to a quarter done. 
> 
> If you're interested in that story or where this 'verse heads next, I would recommend subscribing to the series page. I'm really excited to tell the next arc, and I hope you all continue to enjoy the ride! I love hearing from readers; kudos and comments mean the world to me, if you've liked the story and feel like leaving feedback. 
> 
> As always, thank you to everyone who commented, kudos'd, bookmarked, subscribed, and read this story. <3


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